NATIONAL SCIENCE WEEK

The bestest week of the year

Down in Australia it's national science week. To get on board with the activities check out the web site here. We kicked it off last night at the cub pack sleep over participating in the Big Aussie Star Hunt.

But of the many benefits offered by Science this one caught my eye. By mathematicians at the Carlton University & University of Ottowa have completed research on

WHEN ZOMBIES ATTACK!: MATHEMATICAL MODELLING OF AN OUTBREAK OF ZOMBIE INFECTION

Here is a link to the chapter.

It examines three possible stratigies

• quarantine (could lead to eradication, but unlikely to happen)
• treatment (some humans survive, but they still must coexist with zombies),

but shows that there is REALLY only one strategy likely to succeed:

“impulsive eradication.”

I love it -

“impulsive eradication.”

Probably like the impulsive eradication demonstrated in the new trailer for the upcoming survival training video with Woody Harrelson 'ZOMBIELAND'

The study goes on to record “Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time,” they concluded.

And if we don’t act fast enough?

“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,” they wrote. “This is because human births and deaths will provide the undead with a limitless supply of new bodies to infect, resurrect and convert.”

How fast do we need to deal with the outbreak?

Here’s the equation they used, where S = susceptibles, Z = zombies and R = removed. If an infection breaks out in a city of 500,000 people, the zombies will outnumber the susceptibles in about three hours.

So there it is -Aim for the head and shoot fast.

This is an example where the world of academia is providing useful advice to deal with real world situations.

I love science.

A day that will live in INFAMY

A date which will live in infamy…no matter how long it may take us to overcome this, …the American people, in their righteous might, will win through…."

Obviously he was referring to the granting of a U.S. patent 735,777 on 12 August 1903 to the KATO coffee company for “Coffee Concentrate and process of making same”

That right INSTANT COFFEE was unleashed upon the world at the PAN AMERICIAN Exposition in Buffalo later that year. This was probably what led to president William McKinley being shot when he visited the fair in September.

I admit it is a luxury, but a fine espresso is a civilized start to any day and a cup of instant coffee is an abomination.

"No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness". ~Sheik Abd-al-Kadir

“It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning. It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion” my co-workers get nervous when I start muttering this.

Whose up for a cup?