Halloween Special - Zombies

A possible future?

The shambling undead with an insatiable appetite for braaains, blue-grey corpses coming to life to wreak vengeance on the living, mindless automatons that usually overwhelmingly outnumber small pockets of survivors, these are the setups for your average zombie-flick. The ‘first’ zombie film was George Romero’s 1968 “Night of the Living Dead”, where the shambling un-dead were metaphors for “for homosexual repression, the civil rights movement, feminism, the counterculture, or an unwinnable war in Vietnam” (source)

The zombies have also been made proxies for corporate greed and consumerism
(Resident Evil 1(2002) , Land of the Dead (2005)), class warfare (Day of the Dead (1985)), genetic engineering and worldwide virus pandemics (All the Resident Evils, 28 Days Later (2002) and 28 Weeks Later (2007)), environmental catastrophe (Silent Hill (2006)) and pretty much any other issue you can think of...oh yeah and death.

It is therefore unsurprising that ‘serious’ scientists and professors have begun to use zombies and the zombie apocalypse for theories in their respective disciplines. First up, a research paper published in Infectious Disease Modeling Research Progress (2009) entitled “When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modeling of an outbreak of Zombie infection” (available here).

A "zombie" with the "rage virus" (from "28 days later")

Due to the sheer variety of zombies out there, these professors felt it necessary to define the type of zombie they were dealing with:

“The model zombie is of the classical pop-culture zombie: slow moving, cannibalistic and undead. There are other ‘types’ of zombies, characterised by some movies like 28 Days Later [9] and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead [10]. These ‘zombies’ can move faster, are more independent and much smarter than their classical counterparts.”

And what these scientists have inadvertently stumbled on is the great debate amongst zombie-aficionados, the recent evolution of the fast zombie. Quoting the zombie master par excellence, Simon Pegg of Shaun of the Dead (2004) in a column for The Guardian:

“You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can't fly; zombies do not run.”

Back to the research paper, the scientists used the zombies as a model for any virus outbreak, and using the characteristics of zombies (susceptibility, infectiousness, etc...) they came to some pretty grim conclusions for any surviving humans in the event of the zombie apocalypse.

At this point, Professor of International Politics, Donald W. Drezner published an article for Foreign Policy magazine, “Theory of International Politics and Zombies”, who details various political schools of thought and exactly what they would do in the event of a global zombie pandemic.

For example:

“A structural realist would argue that, because of the uneven distribution of capabilities, some governments will be better placed to repulse the zombies than others.”

or that social constructivists

“would posit that the zombie problem is what we make of it. That is to say, there are a number of possible emergent norms in response to zombies.”

The article is funny and well worth the read. And regardless of your own feelings towards the undead, clearly some serious people are giving it some thought.

Happy Halloween!!!!

A vegetarian zombie - most
likely a social constructivist

Running People

A disturbing, mesmerizing, repellant yet utterly engrossing, comical and totally weird video of…people..running…in slow motion. (via Metafilter...I think)

Sushi without Japanese

This is unintentionally funny. In brief, US cities that are commonly held up as role models of ideal "progressive" cities to live in appear to be mostly white.

Using whatever socio-economic indicators to measure these things, amongst the top ten cities in the USA to live in are Austin, Texas and Portland, Oregon. So one enterprising "opinion-leading urban success strategist and writer" has looked at the statistics, and found a remarkable correlation between the 'whiteness' of a city and it's consistently high rankings in the top cities to live in in the US of A. The #1 Role Model in environmental and sustainable policies is Portland.

The disconnect between reality and aspirations of Portland has been noted before, here in a 2008 article in the New York Times:

“I’ve been really upset by what I perceive to be Portland’s blind spot in its progressivism,” said Khaela Maricich, a local artist and musician. “They think they live in the best city in the country, but it’s all about saving the environment and things like that. It’s not really about social issues. It’s upper-middle-class progressivism, really.”

I would argue that the "sushi without japanese" phenomena of Portland is exactly what "upper-middle-class progressivism" is all about, and this idea that 'diversity' should be pursued simply because diversity=Good, is a form of insincere self-righteous preening that is the exclusive purview of certain vegetarians, Toyota Prius drivers and Obama voters ("I voted for Obama so I can't be racist")

The strangest thing I came across whilst researching this was that I found Americans openly rank cities based on progressiveness where progressiveness is defined by the proportion of people who voted Green or for the Democrats, and the city council's policies on the environment and global warming, and all the usual feel-good/do almost nothing measures that inevitably follow. I find it very strange that you would choose a city based on conformity of views..."Yeah I was going to move to Sydney but they vote so Labour that I decided on Cairns instead".

And in proving that real-life does not lack humour, here is a screenshot of the Oregonian
viewed at 11:04am (AEST) 27/10/09. No racist stereotypes here, no sir....

Afghanistan

Some amazing photojournalism from Afghanistan. Link here.

Genocide 4 Gaia

To prove the anti-human motive behind the hoax formerly known as Global Warming, an editorial in the Guardian states:

The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children.

From amorality to barking mad:

As Rachel Baird, who works on climate change for Christian Aid, says: "Often in the countries where the birth rate is highest, emissions are so low that they are not even measurable. Look at Burkina Faso." So why ask them to pay in unborn children for our profligacy?

Yeah why not? Lets get the Burkino Fasolians to offset our babies. Because of the environmental utopia that is Burkino Faso has only a little bit of "ethnic conflict" despite the presence of more than 9,000 UN forces (source CIA World Factbook)

Back to the Guardian:

Could children perhaps become part of an adult's personal carbon allowance?

It was only just recently that they banned incandescent light bulbs. A few short years from light bulbs to children. And just in case you think this crazy man is talking about 'others':

By today's standards, a cull of Australians or Americans would be at least 60 times as productive as one of Bangladeshis.

A cull of Australians or Americans?!!? Another word for a "cull" of any group of humans defined by race, ethnicity or nationality is..."genocide". It used to be that genocide was not something you mentioned in polite company. Now it is being advocated as a 'cure' to the Warming. One hopes common sense will prevail before the developed world goes too far down the rabbit hole.

Another take down by Mark Steyn.

It's the !@#ing Count!!!

It's an oldie but worth it...

Future present

"I have suggested that supernovae are the industrial accidents of advanced civilisations."
--Arthur C. Clarke, October 2007

An element of the Large Hadron Collider (picture source)

Question: What happens when you try to create Higgs boson particle?
Answer: The creation of an observable Higgs boson particle is so abhorrent to the Universe that at some point in the future, when walking monkeys on some minuscule planet in an outer-spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy discover how to do it, the Universe reaches back across time and prevents this happening.

At least that’s what two physicists have claimed in a research paper entitled “Search for Effect for Influence from Future in Large Hadron Collider”

The CERN project (of which I had previously written about here) known as the Large Hadron Collider is a machine 27km big that attempts to collide two beams of protons together to observe the resulting explosion and expand our knowledge of the universe or something to that effect. A successful collision would apparently enable physicists to observe the Higgs boson particle.

The Higgs boson particle is a theoretical particle that will ”explain the origin of mass in the universe” (thanks wikipedia). Scientist haven’t seen it (yet), but our current understanding of particle physics predicts it. Particle physics is the research of subatomic particles. Yeah, that explains it.....

The physicist propose an experiment involving a deck of ‘decision cards’ (ie “Run LHC experiment” or “For God’s sake you puny mortals, don’t even attempt this experiment -- yours truly, a future Higgs boson particle”) to model various probabilities whether to run the LHC or not, they suggest that the current difficulties in getting the LHC working, and also what happened to the ill-fated US SSC, may be as a result of future Universe affecting the present.

How can they say this? Well, according to the theory of General Relativity and and the Standard Model of Particles, time travel is theoretically possible:

“Particles and their antiparticles can also be thought of as being the same entity travelling in opposite directions in time.”

In plain english, the physicists are saying that in the future, when a Higgs boson particle is created, the consequence of this is so great that we are feeling the effects of it in the past (ie. now).

Here is a simple diagram I created to show this:

see?!? simple...

Not that I'm suggesting that this experiment could cause a supernova, as the Arthur C. Clarke quote above might imply, although if you happen to be running an experiment that requires so much energy that you have to schedule it around the energy supply of an entire continent, to term a mishap "an industrial accident" may be waaayyy understating it. From the previous article:

"All of this means that when something goes wrong—even something small—there's a very real chance that it will go wrong in a big way."

And a much scarier sentence a little bit further on:

"That's not to say that we have no idea what will happen; rather, there are a range of possibilities, some of which may be out of reach of the energies created by the LHC."

One hopes all the experiments go exactly. to. plan.

Links:

• The New York Times article
• The website of the ill-fated Supercolliding SuperConductor
• Wikipedia page on Supernova

Deep in the Matrix

A Toyota car ad

Making international headlines last week was “Woman Sues Toyota over terrifying Prank” :

In a lawsuit filed Sept. 28 in Los Angeles Superior Court, Amber Duick claims she had difficulty eating, sleeping and going to work during March and April of last year after she received e-mails for five days from a fictitious man called Sebastian Bowler, from England, who said he was on the run from the law, knew her and where she lived, and was coming to her home to hide from the police.

I wanted to know how a marketing campaign could have gone so wrong (or perhaps “so right”)? And although no one has ever become poor by underestimating the stupidity of people, I was curious how a marketing campaign could provoke such a reaction. From a country with a history of people suing advertisers (like this one where a man sued the makers of Bud Light for making ads involving tropical fantasies of beautiful women coming to life, because, and I'm dead serious here, he didn't have that experience when consuming Bud Light), I initially assumed that the woman suing Toyota was, how you say…a couple of beers short of a six-pack?

A Toyota car ad

But researching campaign, I noted that it was not just TV or Radio ads, but fake MySpace profiles, print ads,personalized email spam, text messages, phone calls....

I'll let the Art Director responsible for the campaign describe it to you (short flash video). It's worth checking it out as it is a very involved campaign.

In brief: How it works is that someone would sign up one of their friends selecting one of the 5 "maniacs", and then that friend would be spammed with a variety of personalized communications by said maniac, and in the case above, threaten to come and live at their house and get them to help pay for hotel damage bills.

The campaign was targeting the 35 year old males demographic, with no life commitments and are "sick of advertising". Keeping this in mind, it's no wonder that a clever campaign like this managed to avoid looking like advertising, thereby "terrorizing" unwitting participants, however I'm not quite sure Saatchi & Saatchi are culpable, and I'm not sure it's fair to accuse the women of stupidity. The campaign was designed to be a disturbing prank, and it succeeded. Blending the power of Web 2.0 technologies and slick personalized advertising messages, it blurred the distinction we consumers have come to understand between advertising and 'real-life'. Despite the lawsuit (in fact I would argue because of the lawsuit) expect more clever campaigns like this in the future.

A Toyota car ad

Links

A couple of the "maniacs" MySpace pages:
http://www.myspace.com/racoonie
http://www.myspace.com/sakura_on_fire

A video with another description of the case:
http://www.autonews.com/article/20091002/ANA08/910029986/1221/mobile&template=art4

The breakdown of the “Your other You” campaign is described here:
http://tmspreview.com/yoycampaign/

A further discussion of the campaign:
http://zehnkatzen.blogspot.com/2008/04/addesign-toyota-matrix-campaign-who_06.html

The Art director's website:
http://www.nickluckett.com/matrix-your-other-you/

Picture sources
http://adverlicio.us/toyota_matrix_sebastians_academy_of_pub_fighting_728x90_unbranded
http://blog.signalnoise.com/?p=265

Another clever Toyota Matrix campaign
http://www.marketingmag.ca/english/creative/featuredcampaign/article.jsp?content=20080430_142446_9020

An awesome website dedicated to ridiculous lawsuits:
http://facesoflawsuitabuse.org/

Getting people to...care

From The New York Times:

The money sentence:

"Getting people to care about a climate threat that is decades away is hard enough, they say, without adding in the vagaries of natural climate cycles."

How about that? Imagine colouring this debate with facts of "natural climate cycles"??!?! I don’t know why it hasn’t been tried before….

It has to be noted that the brain trust that came up with the above statement were “social scientists”, clearly THE authorities on climate related problems.

Friggin Space Traffic

Watch it to the end...

BBC Warming up to skeptics

A skeptical Warming article on the BBC? Didn't think I'd see the day.

Entitled "What happened to Global Warming?", the article publishes a fact that the IPCC and it's many Global Warming Hysterics have yet to admit, that the Earth has not warmed in the last 11 years, and the hottest years "on record" is 1998.

"And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise."

Admitting the blatant inaccuracies of climate models AND the inconsistencies of our carbon-dioxide models..in the same sentence?? Please note that the Australian Government is trying to rush through legislation for an Emissions Trading Scheme (E.T.S) which will affect all Australian households and business based on carbon dioxide emissions.

There is of course the mandatory questioning of the evidence:

"Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."

And of course the defence of current climate models (ALL of which failed to predict this 11 year cooling phase):

"The UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, says it incorporates solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new.

In fact, the centre says they are just two of the whole host of known factors that influence global temperatures - all of which are accounted for by its models."

But don't worry believers, an article daring to venture the skeptical viewpoint would not have got by the Editors if it didn't support 'overall' the Hysteric point of view:

"What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up."

Of course, once you factor in the Medieval Warm Period and take a reasonable sample of historical global temperatures, the spectacularly debunked hockey stick disappears, and that according to Jack's research, shows the long term trend is certainly not going up (at least not by a scary woo-woo 1C...in 100 years....maybe....)

However there is comfort in the last sentence:

"One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up."

Someone please tell Al Gore....

Total rubbish

Hand over your rubbish...or else...

From this story:

concerned neighbours saw mysterious men emptying their bins into black sacks and loading them into an unmarked white van.

When homeowners questioned the official binmen an hour later they learned their council was conducting a survey of what was being thrown away.

Now, try as I might, I can't really link this in to The Warming hysteria, although the current Western obsession about all things environmental probably has something to do with it. The UK does seem to be leading the world in spying on their own citizens to ensure, amongst other things, efficient energy usage. And like every other viewer of CSI, I know that garbage left out on the street can't really be 'stolen', however I don't see the need for unmarked vans, hoodies and all the secrecy.

It's just a little...weird.