Some zombies, some of the time

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Blake Messer writes:

I read your blog frequently, and just wanted to show you this model I made, revisiting the “Smith?” publication’s findings on zombie outbreak dynamics.

7 thoughts on “Some zombies, some of the time”

  1. As a fellow zombie researcher ( http://models.street-artists.org/?p=554 ) I would like to point out that my model which takes into account both of the shortfalls suggested by this author seems to reproduce a well known phenomenon of zombie dynamics vis. the fact that zombies always come in waves at the time when you have finally let your guard down. I suspect that geographically distributed "defensibility" is much less of an issue than mental "readiness" and I strongly support the Hollywood intelligentsia for their important role in educating the public about the hazards of zombie infestation.

  2. I think this model brilliantly supports the always-ready-for-the-Zombacalypse hypothesis. How do we make sure there are large and well concentrated enough defensible areas? Preparation, preparation, preparation. It's great to see two very different approaches reach such a similar answer.

    The new wrinkle, perhaps, is that such defenses can only be built with the support of the community around you. So get to know your neighbors. Have a plan. Be prepared.

    Otherwise, the might eat you.

  3. ow, my tongue hurts from being so forcefully planted into my cheek, this zombie thing is perhaps getting out of hand. It's such a great tool for humorous fun-poking at typical academic activities.

  4. Daniel,

    You're probably right. We could consider education like vaccination in "real" disease models. Then we just need to educate enough people sufficiently to reach some sort of zombie version of herd immunity.

  5. I'll see if we can get a question on this in the next GSS. As Zheng, Salganik, and I demonstrated in our 2006 JASA article, you can use How many X's questions to learn about groups that are not directly sampled in a survey. In that paper, we discussed prisoners, but I'd think that similar methodology could be applied to zombies or, for that matter, ghosts, aliens, angels, and other hard-to-reach entities.

  7. Shouldn't there be another parameter in the model describing the rate of decay of zombies? Being animated corpses, it's only a matter of time (several weeks?) before a zombie simply falls apart and is no longer a threat.

    Also, considering the interest my dog takes in dead animals on the street, I think the millions of domesticated dogs in the country would find zombies to be walking smorgasbords. :)

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