If you’ve ever gone for a walk down main street in Santa Monica, you may have passed by a store front filled with all kinds of paraphernalia. This is the home of jAdis, a museum of sorts, filled with props from TV and movie history, from a model of the robot in Metropolis to a spitting image of everyone’s favorite crypt keeper.
Hey there good lookin’…
No doubt maintaining such a large collection of Tinseltown history is not necessarily an inexpensive endeavor – for this reason, there is a nominal fee for those wishing to enter jAdis and sift through its treasures. Unfortunately, it looks like someone forgot to double-check the pricing scheme.
I’m not sure who thought it would be a good idea to charge more per person if you have more than one person in your group, but something tells me this bold strategy may not pan out. Then again, I’m sure people just assume they are saving money by using the group rates. Maybe they meant to say that one person is $3 instead of $2 – this would then make everything consistent.
Whether it’s a typo or not, if you decide to pony up the cash, make sure you and your friends pay separately. And remember: the group discount is not always what it seems.
UPDATE (11/24/09): The manager of jAdis was kind enough to respond to my post – you can see the comment below. We were told by a freind of your concerns about our Math. Apparently the price scheme is deliberate, and I am comforted by the fact that “9 out of 10″ people seem to be in on the joke. This is a relief.
If pop culture has taught us anything, it is that in the event of a zombie outbreak, we are royally screwed. When faced with an onslaught of classical zombies (of the type first made famous by Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead), films have shown again and again that we are no match for hordes of cannibalistic undead. With the more recent interpretation of zombies that are faster and smarter, our hopes for survival have diminished even further.
Despite overwhelming odds, however, it is not in our nature to simply roll over in the face of adversity. While the body count is usually high in films chronicling the eventual war between the living and the dead, in most cases there are a few who survive to continue the fight after the credits roll.
But how realistic is this depiction? How prepared are we to defend ourselves from being eaten alive by our deceased ancestors? And what strategies will give us the best chance of survival? You’ll be happy to know that mathematics can answer some of these questions.
Hopefully we are more prepared than Homer Simpson.
Students from the mathematics departments at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa have produced several mathematical models to predict what will happen in the event of a zombie outbreak, and how our response to such an outbreak may affect its outcome. The students, led by Professor Robert J. Smith? (this is not a question, he simply insists on this piece of punctuation after his name) used the theory of differential equations to see what would happen in the event that the dead rise from their graves in search of fresh meat.
As would be expected from a paper with such important pop-culture consequences, this research has already garnered a fair amount of attention. The Globe and Mail ran an article last Friday, as did Wired (and with a much cooler picture, I might add). However, if you really want to get to the heart of the matter, here’s a link to the original paper.
Their model eschews the post-28 Days Later interpretation of zombies, focusing instead on the lumbering, thoughtless monsters that have been the stuff of childhood nightmares for decades. One could argue, however, that the results presented in their work would be even grimmer were we to allow zombies the benefit of intelligence and the ability to run a 6:00 mile.
The underlying ideas are similar to those of the SIR model for the spread of infectious disease, which has been discussed elsewhere on this corner of the internet. One significant difference here, of course, is that when dealing with a zombie infestation, dead people may not necessarily stay dead. This adds complications to the theory, but also allows for a richer analysis.
It’s unclear whether or not the zombies in this model know how to dance.
In the end, their research gives us the following insights into the nature of zombie warfare:
With one exception, human-zombie coexistence is not possible. In order to save humanity from a zombie infestation, we must kill every last one of them.
Often times there is a period of latency from the time a person is bitten until the time they turn into a zombie. Whether or not such latency exists will not have an effect on whether or not the zombie hordes will overwhelm us – the only thing that changes is how long it will take for them to do so.
Quarantining is not an effective way to try and stop a zombie outbreak. All it will do is prolong our extinction.
The only model where coexistence is possible is a model in which a cure exists for zombification. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your preferences), in such a world the zombie population would greatly outnumber the human population. In other words, we would survive, but not by much.
The only way to ensure our survival is to attack with decisive force as frequently as we are able. In particular, the model ignores the impact of birth and death rates, which is fine over a brief period of time, but becomes more significant as the fight continues, since more bodies means more potential zombies. In other words, the longer the fight goes on, the less likely we are to emerge from it.
For the self professed zombie expert, these findings may not be all that surprising. For the rest of us, however, it just goes to show you how far a little mathematics can take you, even when exploring the realms of the highly improbable. You may scoff at this article now, but when World War Z arrives, you’ll be thankful that someone took the time to conduct this preliminary research.
(Hat tip to Patrick for the link to the Globe & Mail article. With a colder climate that no doubt helps to preserve dead bodies, it’s no wonder that Canadians are blazing a trail with this research – they will be on the front lines when the time comes.)
In continuing with the theme of discussing movies before I see them, I’d like to say a few words about the upcoming film District 9. You can see the trailer below, if you haven’t heard of it (although if you live in LA it’s difficult to plead ignorance, since the viral marketing has been on full blast all summer).
It’s natural to ask what a film about aliens living in South African refugee camps has to do with mathematics. Aside from the obvious (no doubt any intergalactic species must have a good working knowledge of mathematics), I’d like to point you to an aspect of the marketing campaign for the film that’s featured on the official website. If you look in the lower right, you will see a link to a site that immediately aroused my interest: Maths From Outer Space.
The purpose of this website is best summarized in its own words:
Maths From Outer Space wants to redefine what it means to be human! Our scientists have found a way to enhance the spatial and logic capabilities of the human body… In other words, we’ve found a way to make you smarter! Would you like to see if you are qualified to take part in this exciting endeavor?
From here, you can click through to take a math test. This is remarkable for a few reasons. First of all, the fact that a film like this would even incorporate a math test as part of its marketing strategy is pretty interesting. But not only that, by the end of the quiz the difficulty level of the questions went far beyond my expectations. This is a summer movie about aliens, after all, and yet their math quiz ends with questions like this:
Nothing in the quiz goes beyond the level of calculus, but even this level of sophistication is fairly surprising. After all, not even films with subject matter that focuses on mathematics give math quizzes, let alone math quizzes involving calculus.
Unfortunately, it’s not perfect. First of all, there are some mistakes in the quiz – what is one to do when none of the options given is correct?
The “correct” answer is the first one. Perhaps if aliens had mastered the concept of the derivative, they wouldn’t have gotten trapped in the slums of Johannesburg.
Even worse is the fact that even if you answer all the questions correctly, there is no payoff. When you click to learn more about the “enrollment details,” you’re sent to a bogus link. How disappointing for the student who dreams of one day applying his math skills to uncover the secrets of advanced alien technologies.
Overall, though, I must give kudos to District 9 for its proactive stance on the integration of mathematics and film (then again, coming from a distributor called QED International, is it really a surprise?). If only more summer blockbusters would follow this lead. Perhaps other studios will take note, and next year will feature an even more seamless integration between pop entertainment and post-secondary school mathematics.
The future of summer entertainment? One can only hope so.
I recently had the pleasure of stumbling across Paul Lockhart’s essay, A Mathematician’s Lament. Lockhart, a former research mathematician in analytic number theory who received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1990, decided to leave academia in 2000 in order to concentrate on K-12 math education, which he hass been doing at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn.
Lockhart’s article lambasts the current state of mathematics education in this country. Some of his main points are the following:
Mathematics is an art form, but unlike other art forms like music or painting, is not understood as such by the general population. As a result, students are not exposed to the beauty of mathematics, and are instead taught through drill and memorization, which effectively kills any natural curiosity the student may have.
The most important part of mathematics lies not in the facts or theorems that students memorize, but in the arguments that show why these facts must be true. By stripping away the beauty and elegance that lies behind many of these arguments, students don’t develop an appreciation for (or a real ability to do) mathematics.
The only class that does emphasize proof (high school geometry) sterilizes the process so much that all the beauty is drained from the arguments.
Math education spends too much time trying to force artificial connections to the real world, rather than exposing the natural beauty that lies within mathematics. Most word problems don’t actually reflect any type of problem that one would find in the real world.
There’s much more, of course, but the article itself does a much better job of expanding on these points than I could. Lockhart takes an extreme position, to be sure, but in so doing he exposes much of what is horribly broken with our current system.
More than anything else I’ve posted, I recommend you read the article and percolate on it. Lockhart originally wrote this around 2002, but it wasn’t published until last year – since then it’s made the rounds in academic circles, I’m sure, but I hadn’t heard of it until it was posted on Slashdot earlier this summer. This is all well and good, but for most people with technical backgrounds, Lockhart is preaching to the choir. Since this blog caters to a more general audience, I would particularly encourage those who don’t work in the sciences to read through what Lockhart says – much of it will resonate with you, especially if you hated math as a student.
Lockhart certainly offers plenty for debate. Here are some questions I have after reading the article:
Lockhart has no love for the endless drilling that goes on in current math classes (the type of drilling that continues all the way up through calculus). But to what extent are drills a necessary evil? If you want to become a concert pianist, you’d better practice your scales. Nobody will argue that drills are particularly taxing, but they do have their purpose in other arts – shouldn’t they in mathematics as well?
Many are quick to point out the one major problem with comparing mathematics to other art forms: mathematics has wide applicability to other fields, whereas other art forms do not. Lockhart argues that even though this is the case, the essence of mathematics isn’t its practical consequences. This may reflect his own personal bias (after all, he was a researcher in analytic number theory), and while it’s a bias I share to a certain extent, I doubt that this is a universal belief among mathematicians in general.
I often find that students feed into the current system of teaching the facts rather than the ideas, because the facts are easier to check on standardized tests. Most students want to know a technique for solving a problem, and couldn’t care less about why the technique works, where it came from, or most importantly, its limitations. In essence, I see a tremendous lack of curiosity. Much of this seems to stem from a desire to get a good grade (which may lead to a good job), rather than wanting to learn for learning’s sake. However, this is a problem that goes beyond mathematics – to what extent are the problems Lockhart address indicative of broader problems in education?
Give it a read – if nothing else, it will give you something to think about.
Hey there good lookin’…
