Centre of the Universe

A few days ago, I got a question in regards to my tutorials on my blog from Kamal, and was quite surprised when I saw his credentials.

Kamal works for the NASA Education and Public Outreach Group at the Sonoma State University. Yes, that is right, I said he has some association with NASA. That dream of every kid who has any interest in space at all.

And no, he is not an astronaut (although I have no doubt he would jump at the chance) but is involved in creating educational material about NASA’s high-energy astrophysics space missions.

Kamal’s blog, Science Square, focuses on science. It is very interesting reads and rather than concentrating on high-end science that only a phD student could understand, all his articles are easily accessible to the average person.

He is also one of the authors of the web comic Epo’s Chronicle.

I came across a very interesting story on Reddit today.

A team of mathematicians, Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea, Joe Imad and Robert J. Smith, from the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, have published a paper entitled When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical modelling of an outbreak of zomie infection.

Normally, the world tends to view mathematicians as a staid, humourless bunch of nerds hiding away in a musty office playing with numbers all day. I think this goes to prove otherwise…or at the very least, they have a sense of humour.

The research paper is written in a serious way, and for those who are braver than most, it includes a lot of mathematical formulae describing the infection rate when a zombie bites a human, taking into account factors such as susceptibility, quarantine and treatment.

The paper is not pointless though. Even though these guys have chosen a topic featured in just about every B-grade horror film since the 50’s, the paper does model how an infectious disease would be able to propagate through a population. So, for example, you could replace Zombie infection, with Swine flu infection. The principle remains the same, but I certainly think it makes for a much more fun to read research paper when we talk about zombies.