August 19th, 2009 : Zombie Apocalypse  

Maybe recent epidemics such as swine flu have raised public concern… or maybe too many people are playing Left 4 Dead while commemorating Michael Jackson with excessive rounds of his Thriller video. Whatever the case may be, according to a handful of researchers, surviving a zombie apocalypse has become worthy of academic study and findings are looking pretty grim for humanity. A team of Canadian mathematicians from the University of Ottawa and Carleton University point out,

If the timescale of the outbreak increases, then the result is the doomsday scenario: an outbreak of zombies will result in the collapse of civilization, with every human infected, or dead. This is because human births and deaths will provide the undead with a limitless supply of new bodies to infect, resurrect and convert.

Their paper speculates that a city could be overrun in three or four days. I guess it’s time I took this seriously and picked up a copy of The Zombie Survival Guide or just get ready to admit defeat and sign up for an account at ZombieHarmony (because the apocalypse doesn’t have to be lonely).

While I do appreciate zombie movies as much as anyone else, attempting to perform a serious study that uses a zombie model based on modern pop culture representations out of Dawn of the Dead seems as misguided as performing a vampire study based on findings from Twilight (gosh, what would you do if an Edward Cullen-esque vampire sparkled at you?!). On the other hand, actually getting paid to watch movies and play video games so you can write When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak Of Zombie Infection might not be such a bad gig after all and certaintly has a lot of blogs buzzing about it.

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