How That 'Extra .9%' Could Ward Off a Zombie Apocalypse
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netbuzz writes "The questioner on Quora asks: 'When is the difference between 99% accuracy and 99.9% accuracy very important?' And the most popular answer provided cites an example familiar to all of you: service level agreements. However, the most entertaining reply comes from a computer science and mathematics student at the University of Texas, Alex Suchman. Here's his answer: 'When it can stop a Zombie Apocalypse.'"
That's not the question (Score:2, Offtopic)
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A zombie apocalypse happened in Britain and was shown in a BBC documentary by Derren Brown.
I don't even know where to start pointing out what's wrong with that sentence.
Re:That's not the question (Score:4, Funny)
Start by looking at yourself in a mirror. Maybe you'll see something whooshing over your head.
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A zombie apocalypse happened in Britain and was shown in a BBC documentary by Derren Brown.
I don't even know where to start pointing out what's wrong with that sentence.
.. i do.. it was channel 4 for s start
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But if not, I wanna see that Derren Brown special, he does some seriously cool stuff. You know you're a good magician/mentalist when some people think you're the "real deal", (even when you admit you're not). I guess that makes him the Kreskin of the times.
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Or any disease at all. What he's really pointed out is that you need to have an extremely specific test before you can even consider using it for screening. The textbook example is mammography.
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If you want to be boring replace "test for zombification" with "mammogram for breast cancer."
Both are examples of why we have so few screening tests. That's why full body CT is detrimental when used as a screening test.
Re:That's not the question (Score:5, Insightful)
Well aren't you the genius.
The only difference between genius and insanity is that all the voices get along.
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I for dumber for having read TFA. It could have been education if they had walked through the math for the kids in the audience.
here's the article for those who don't read: some anonymous computer science college kid explains why a test for zombie disease that's 99.9% accurate is better than a test that's 99% accurate. Why anyone cares what anonymous computer science college kid says about hypothetical zombie disease test is beyond me. April fools?
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Me.
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No Bath Salts are what happened to John McAfee i.e. going nuts and paranoid perhaps to the point of shooting your neighbor. Any connection to consuming shitty stimulants and actual flesh eating was and remains wild and unproven speculation.
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No Bath Salts are what happened to John McAfee i.e. going nuts and paranoid perhaps to the point of shooting your neighbor. Any connection to consuming shitty stimulants and actual flesh eating was and remains wild and unproven speculation.
McAfee was into bath salts?.. i am pretty sure that with his budget and location at the time you suggest he could get better than bath salts pretty canned cheap................. you have any proof he was into bath salts or proof he shot his neighbour? any connection between what YOU have claimed and actual facts remain wild and unproven speculation... wouldn't you say???
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He was into designing and testing new psychoactive substances in his expensive lab, not buying them cheap off the street.
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No, bath salts are what likely caused the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_cannibal [wikipedia.org] attack last year (truly, one of those classic "only in Miami" incidents that horrify the world, and leave Dade County residents convinced that we live in an ever-so-slightly fucked up parallel universe where normal sanity doesn't necessarily apply.
The fact that John McAfee ended up in Miami is just a coincidence. Now, had McAfee's neighbor face been *eaten*...
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For example rabies. Sure the the infected are not "undead" but the world in 28 days later was not a fun place to be.
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Granted freely, but the majority of those parasites occur in insect hosts. The only exception I can think of is a parasitic isopod that causes a host fish's tongue to atrophy and the isopod resides in that spot as it grows. The fish may just arguably have a psychological change - that is, it may think that what is occasionally touching the roof of its mouth is still just its normal tongue. I don't know offhand how you would prove or disprove that.
As to whether a 'z
Re:That's not the question (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't write a story about a world where some weird virus makes people want to bite each other's necks and drink their blood and say it's about vampires. It's about a weird virus that makes people want to bite each other's necks and drink their blood.
Re:That's not the question (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's not the question (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish such an agency existed. Then we wouldn't have that sparkling bullshit.
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I'll just have to ""Friend"" you instead...
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I think I smell a new Tuesday late-night independent channel crime drama! "Vampire FBI: Supernatural Victims Unit"
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Just because people bite other people doesn't make them zombies. If they're not undead, they're not zombies.
You can't write a story about a world where some weird virus makes people want to bite each other's necks and drink their blood and say it's about vampires. It's about a weird virus that makes people want to bite each other's necks and drink their blood.
So, basically, whether or not they behave like zombies is irrelevant, they have to be literally be killed and then reanimated? Leaving aside the levitating goalposts, I can still work with that (off of the top of my head) in a plot involving a defib or similar. Human bodies are remarkably easy to bring back to life as long as certain constraints are adhered to ... for example the countdown time limit before reanimation. So .. the viral infection -> hallucinations part of symptoms -> host infects othe
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Yup. Otherwise they're just pseudozombies. Or zomboids, if you prefer.
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How about a bacteria that generate an electric charge similar to an electric eel. when they have a large enough population they are able to control the muscles in their host via this electric charge. this would potentially still work for a while after the host is clinically dead.
someone else can figure out how the bacteria can make a human keep their balance while walking.
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" Human bodies are remarkably easy to bring back to life as long as certain constraints are adhered to ."
you watch too many tv shows. The majority of attempts right at the moment of death fail.
"symptoms only show themselves after heart stops"
You are really underscoring your ignorance of how the human body work,. you should stop before you run right out of ignorant and into stupid.
" that's a realistic plot;"
no, no it is not. It's a fine hand wavy plot device for a story, or a game. Nothing more.
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Ok, so was the movie Zombieland about zombies or not?
Re:That's not the question (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok they sound plausible. However in all such cases, the zombie apocalypse would be very short lived - the infected humans simply wouldn't be able to survive very long.
There's a reason rabies didn't result in a rabies apocalypse...
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Ok they sound plausible. However in all such cases, the zombie apocalypse would be very short lived - the infected humans simply wouldn't be able to survive very long.
There's a reason rabies didn't result in a rabies apocalypse...
Not a problem - increase incubation period to five years, make the change gradual over that time, make the blood infected (hence transmittable by sex or biting, etc) ... people who are bitten won't admit to it, they gradually get more aggressive over a five year period, transmitting the infection via either sex or biting.
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More magic hand waving.
Did you even think about that at all?
Now you moved the goalpost from biting to sex and biting. I would call you but you whined about goalpost moving earlier.
Anyways, that scenario would be pretty easy to stop.
You are emotional attached to your little pet idea. let it go.
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Ignoring the fact you don't actually no much about the examples you give, lets look at the big picture.
In all case, after, say 100 people get it, people become aware that something is wrong and then take action.
"Viral hallucinogenic infection: "
Too slow.
"Biological weapon "
too vague. You might as well say 'magic happens'
"Mutated bacteria in water supply: "
so it survives the gut, not easy, gets into the blood system, then infects the brain?
Zombies are only a threat in a magic world were infects are instantan
Re:That's not the question (Score:5, Informative)
It's called toxoplasmosis gondii and it makes men violent and women horny.
Rats also get it, and it makes them attracted to the smell of cat piss.
Re:That's not the question (Score:4, Informative)
It's worth noting that the the effects they cause on humans are small enough that they are only detectable when measured across large samples of people, and even then, only to a very small degree. The last time I saw a study on it, the impact was something like a 1-2% difference in reported moods/tendencies across a sample of, I believe, around 100 people, and while I think the report said it was statistically significant, even they admitted that for any particular individual it's nearly impossible that you'd notice any differences between their mood before and after an infection.
Of course, the headline for the article where I first heard about the report was rather sensationalist in nature, and that's what everyone else picked up and ran with, rather than reading the actual findings from the report.
Re:That's not the question either (Score:5, Insightful)
It's probably of deep significance for cultural anthropologists where this zombie meme came from, but I'm actually sick&tired of the whole thing. Zombies == instant unfunny guarantee.
What's worrying is not so much that there's a stupid meme, but that people can even begin to try to rationalise it and behave as though it could actually happen.
Personally, I just think it's feeding the insane "survivalist" mentality that is spreading like a virus through the US. Oh, wait...
Re:That's not the question either (Score:5, Interesting)
...people can even begin to try to rationalise it and behave as though it could actually happen.
It's also an educational opportunity. I occasionally do mentoring, and I've used zombies as a good example for a worst-case scenario for emergency preparedness. It provides a good narrative to cover a wide variety of situations where everything's gone wrong, without entering into a ridiculous movie-plot-specific series of impossibly unlikely events. By starting out with the assumption that we're already in a worst-case scenario, where the survivor is one of only a few to survive an epidemic, it's not a terribly large stretch to assume that the car won't start, or that there's a storm coming, or that an earthquake has broken gas lines, and the survivor can't rely on government services.
Speaking of how impossible a zombie is, the zombie apocalypse also provides some ironically humane ways to discuss epidemiology, biology, medicine, and ethics, because pop-culture zombies are a convenient infection without suffering. The actual conversion process is rarely a focus in stories, and once the zombie is a zombie, they're too mindless to even fear harm. They just keep wandering, not even bothering to eat regularly... which brings us to discussing chemistry and thermodynamics.
Personally, I just think it's feeding the insane "survivalist" mentality that is spreading like a virus through the US. Oh, wait...
Jokes aside, we don't have any Communists or Nazis today to worry about, or Confederates, or British, or Spanish, or Visigoths, or Persians, or even rival tribes. We do have terrorists to fear, but there aren't any terrorists likely to launch a full occupation of the US. The survivalist mentality has always been here, but now we don't have any looming evil that we need to survive. While minor emergencies (such as those requiring the aforementioned preparedness) may happen, the barbarians aren't at the gate. They're in their living rooms, shouting insults into their XBox.
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"and I've used zombies as a good example for a worst-case scenario for emergency preparedness"
You use a scenario where the best way to survive is killing others. Pretty pathetic.
The people around need to be brought together and work for survival.
Train how to do that safely, and you have chance at long term survival of the tribe/species.
Every generation has barbarians at their gates, there are called 'kids'.
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Zombies don't necessarily have to imply an each-man-for-himself festival of backstabbing. Zombies just make a nice set of boundary conditions and backstory.
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It's also a wonderful stand-in for all aspects of a real Pandemic emergency.
It's really the perfect pandemic hypothetical, which is why you see people preparing for Zombie Apocolypse. (read: any and all eventualities resulting from infectious disease significant enough to halt modern civilization).
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It's a useful hypothetical for training. For example, I just recently saw a bit of some TV show about firefighters, where they were trying to rescue a trapped person in a warehouse accident, and some worker there assured them none of the materials stored there were flammable. They got out an acetylene torch to cut the trapped person free of fallen shelves and such, and found out the hard way the worker was wrong. Zombie scenarios give the designer an excuse to present the trainees with lots of people who wo
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I think it sends the right message. IN this scenario, other people are not your friends. If you don't heed this warning or possibility, you will be one of the dead ones.
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Statistics 101 (Score:5, Interesting)
An example we were given in my Intro to Stats module once upon a time used the Space Shuttle Program.
The numbers following the decimal point are very important when it might mean the difference between a Space Shuttle failing catastrophically instead of leaving / returning through the atmosphere intact.
And the vast differences in manufacturing costs between a 99.9%, 99.99% and 99.999% fault tolerant component and why
it would be necessary in the bigger picture of the complete system.
Re:Statistics 101 (Score:4, Interesting)
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Which meshed perfectly with the epidemic of management 9 envy. Er, Um, SURE, the stapler is five nines, six sigma, ISO 9000, and CORBA compliant.
Re:Statistics 101 (Score:4, Insightful)
.
But the summary is a test that is 99% accurate (for both true positives and true negatives) with the zombie incidence rate shown would have
whereas a test that is 99.9% accurate would have
for the incidence of Zombies (Mad Human disease) given in that student's example.
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Be the kind soul to explain me why a test that works in 99 out of 100 times in the lab only actually works 1/6th of the time when applied in the real world?
Re:Statistics 101 (Score:5, Informative)
The key factor is that the trait being tested is rare; only one in 500 people has it. In this case, the false positives can still be (substantially) more frequent than true positives.
Say you test 50,000 people. 100 have it, 49,900 don't. Of the 100 who have it, there will be 99 correct 'yes' results and one incorrect 'no' result. And of the 49900 who don't have it, there will be 49401 correct 'no' results and 499 incorrect 'yes' results.
So total, we have 598 'yes' results. But 499 of those are false positives, which is 83.4444%; only 16.5555% of the folks who test positive are really positive.
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Re:Statistics 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, that reasoning only works when the failures are independent events. If a single event (like cold weather) can cause the failure of one O-ring, it can also cause the failure of the other O-rings, so that failure mode is not independent. And your chance of all three O-rings failing is closer to 1% instead of 0.0001%.
Same thing happened at the Fukushima nuclear plant. They had something like a dozen diesel generators under the theory that even if a few failed to start, it was highly unlikely that all would fail to start. They completely missed the possibility that a single common event could cause all the generators to fail the same way.
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Which is why you'd make the O-rings out of different compounds, and install no set with all the same type.
Locate the diesel generators in 2 or 3 power houses around the site.
2+ server rooms on site with replication between them (with additional replication off-site).
But how much resource do you throw at the problem? Its easy for us after the events to decide if NASA should have used O-rings of differing compounds or Fukashima have multiple power houses on different levels.
Re:Statistics 101 (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is why you'd make the O-rings out of different compounds, and install no set with all the same type.
Which still doesn't eliminate dependent failures, because the failure of one O-ring increases the stress on the next O-ring (particularly the burst of pressure as the first O-ring fails).
Locate the diesel generators in 2 or 3 power houses around the site.
Which doesn't eliminate dependent failures when the failures are due to a contaminated fuel delivery.
2+ server rooms on site with replication between them (with additional replication off-site).
Which doesn't eliminate dependent failures when the failures are due to common software running on all sites.
But how much resource do you throw at the problem? Its easy for us after the events to decide if NASA should have used O-rings of differing compounds or Fukashima have multiple power houses on different levels.
For that you could call me in. Working that out what I do for a living.
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Actually, the Challenger disaster hinged on a different failure in statistics.
Yes, the specification sheet for the O-Rings stated that they would fail in those conditions 100% of the time...
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You do realize that the SRB bands were completely redesigned following Challenger? Not just add a third O ring and be done?
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/technology/images/srb_mod_compare_3.jpg [nasa.gov]
A retainer band around the pins, longer pins, changing the mating feature (Clevis and Tang) from a U to more an S to further prevent gases from escaping. And joint heaters for cold weather.
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(Insightful content snipped.)
> Same thing happened at the Fukushima nuclear plant. They had something like a dozen diesel generators under the theory that even if a few failed to start, it was highly unlikely that all would fail to start. They completely missed the possibility that a single common event could cause all the generators to fail the same way.
It may not have been that simple. In that area tsunamis are fairly common. There are (according to articles, I've never been there) stones hundreds of
Re:Statistics 101 (O-rings) (Score:2)
And why just settle on one letter? Also have P-rings and Q-rings and R-rings etc. to cover more of the alphabet to distribute risk.
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Just think, if you are right 99.9% of the time, then you spend 8,640 seconds per day being wrong - or 2.4 hours.
If, however, you are right 99.9% of the time, then that reduces to 864 seconds, or 0.24 hours.
So based on that, I can only conclude that my wife is the 99.99% one and I am the 0.1% one.
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You've got cancer! (Score:5, Funny)
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Actually, that's pretty much the context that the zombie plague answer is given in.
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Except that if it really was known that a zombie apocalypse could result, they'd take the chance on the 99% test, thus curing one proto-zombie while harming five uninfected people (who won't all die). If it's the fate of all mankind, then should you quibble over that?
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Spot on. I once spent some time (fruitlessly) trying to explain to a guy that a cheap test for HIV that has a false positive rate of 5% will be useful in sub-Saharan Africa (where the occurrence of HIV is around 10-20% of the population), but that very same test is useless in Scandinavia (where it will almost always report a false positive).
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We all have cancer, just like we're all eventually going to die. It's a matter of whether it's under control or not.
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Thanks to denial, I'm going to live forever. - Fry
Promotion? (Score:2)
Is this supposed to get us interested in Quora? If so, it failed. If this is an example of the level of intellectual masturbation on Quora now I will continue to stay away from that boring site.
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If this is an example of the level of intellectual masturbation on Quora now I will continue to stay away from that boring site.
As opposed to Slashdot, where we discuss posts about blogs about Quora answers. Much more interesting..
Poor judgement in TFA (Score:3)
"You can't justify subjecting 5 people to the negative effects of the cure in order to save one zombie, so your discovery is completely useless."
No. You would administer it and risk killing many healthy humans, because the alternative is certain annihilation of the human race.
The premise of the story is fine though. Although my zombie analogy would be the difference between a 99% chance of no zombie outbreak in a year vs. a 99.9% chance. The former would mean a 37% chance of a zombie free century. The latter would mean a 37% chance of a zombie free millennium.
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is anyone outside USA (and not exposed to horror movies) really worried about zombie apocalypse? Really?!
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Even poorer judgment, in fact, as his probability calculation relies on an actual rate of infection of 1 in 500. For such a highly contagious disease the rate of infection will grow (well, duh!) So if 1 in 500 gives about 83% false positives, when the infection rate reaches 1 in 50 the false positive chance drops to 33% and for 1 in 5 to 4%.
So indeed 99% is quite good for a high contagion rate, not so good for low contagion and useless for something that's exceedingly rare (for a disease that affects only o
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... and of course this uses his assumption for the chance of false positives, which is basically ... wrong. Quite embarrassing for a math student, since instead of stating it as an independent variable (as he should have) he assumes that
P(test positive | not infected) = 1 - P(test positive | infected)
where in fact the right hand side is P(test negative | infected), quite a different thing from the left hand side.
If otoh your zombie test has 0 false positives, that .9% will be irrelevant as anyone flagged po
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I didn't read his math because I'm not registering for a Quora account, but from what his text describes he's come up with the right answers. I think you've got your conditional probabilities the wrong way around.
He states early on that the test is 99% accurate, with equal sensitivity and specificity. 99% specificity implies a 1% false positive rate.
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Even poorer judgment, in fact, as his probability calculation relies on an actual rate of infection of 1 in 500. For such a highly contagious disease the rate of infection will grow (well, duh!) So if 1 in 500 gives about 83% false positives, when the infection rate reaches 1 in 50 the false positive chance drops to 33% and for 1 in 5 to 4%.
That said, one could argue that then the infection rate reaches those levels, it would be too late for the cure.
In fact, it may be able to prove (or disprove) this with the equations of motion that we learned back in elementary physics (here's a refresher [wikipedia.org] if you've forgotten them). Substitute velocity with rate of infection, acceleration with how the rate of infection grows, and displacement with number of people infected (obviously, time stays as is), and you'd have a pretty decent starting point. No
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How does 99% over 100 years work out to only 63%?
P(no zombies in 100 years) = p(no zombies in year 1)* ... * p(no zombies in year 100)
= p(no zombies per year)^100 = 0.99^100 = 0.36603... or about 36.6%
similar for the second case, 0.999^1000 = 0.36769... or about 36.8%
I suppose the better illustration of probabilities would be:
99% for a zombie-free year = 36.6% for a zombie-free century
99.9% for a zombie-free year = 90.5% for a zombie-free century
99.99% for a zombie-free year = 99% for a zombie-free century
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You've just made the third most popular statistical error. Multiple measurements on an individual are almost certainly not independent. That is, if the test gives a false positive the first time, it's much more likely to give a false positive the second time.
it's what remains that counts (Score:2)
putting it on completely different subject: if a filter stops 99% of pollutant, you get 10x pollutant unfiltered when compared to the filter with 99.9% efficiency and 100x than with filter of 99.99% efficiency.
Brains (Score:4, Funny)
I was with him until he said one of the perks of being the plague-stopping hero was having your biopic narrarated by Morgan Freeman, when I'd obviously much rather have Zombie Morgan Freeman doing the VoiceOver.
"Brains. My, my, my, some sweet delicious brains would be mighty fine indeed. Brains."
You know you just read that with Morgan Freeman's voice in your head.
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Don't link to a blogspam site that rips off the entire original article's content - link to the original site.
Think of it as a tribute to Roland.
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For those kids who don't know what that's all about: Back about 5 years ago, Roland Piquepaille, an enthusiastic tech writer, was submitting dozens of stories a day to Slashdot, and they were all linking back to his blog. The suspicion was that he was trying to increase his blog's Google rank and advance his career by piggybacking on /.'s relatively good reputation.
Roland died in 2009, so this is a bit of a dated joke.
Re:Just Let It Die (Score:5, Insightful)
Just Let It Die
I'm trying, but it just keeps coming back!
This zombie fad is getting worn out. Just stop it, stop referencing it, stop producing zombie-related media, just STOP.
Alternatively, you could stop trying to be the arbiter of what is good and worthy and just indulge in the media you do enjoy. I'm very sorry* if you feel marginalised by those who have an interest in all things undead and shambling, but no-one's actually forcing to watch The Walking Dead or Jersey Shore.
*I'm not really
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I can take that attitude towards media but the GP has a point. It's spread past mere "media".
Offhand example - Many makers of firearms and accessories have taken up the whole "zombie marketing" angle. One manufacturer took a normal-priced line of cartridges, changed the packaging to something featuring drippy fonts and garish green and red colors, re-named the line "ZombieMax", and seriously
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Another example of the violent stupid giving money for any excuse for the possibility to be violently stupid.
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> I'm very sorry* if you feel marginalised by those who have an interest in all things undead and shambling, but no-one's actually forcing to watch The Walking Dead or Jersey Shore.
I think you nailed it. Jersey Shore is The Walking Dead with better make-up.
But seriously, the existence of these shows (Walking Dead: soap opera with zombies. Game of Thrones: soap opera with swords. Battlestar: Soap opera with spaceships. Revolution: Soap opera with flintlocks) makes me sad, but I don't begrudge their
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We've discussed this before in slashdot, and we're not going to solve it here. The issue is characters behaving stupidly, or performing actions that no reasonable person would do, or if necessary behaving out of previously established character, or the "character" is an amalgam of whatever is necessary to be contentious, all characteristics of which have the sole goal of continuing the melodrama. But again, I am not yet required to watch any of these shows, so it's not really an issue. I don't understand
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I'll take a soap opera any day over a reality show.
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Battlestar wasn't a soap opera - it was a SPACE Opera. Yeesh. Difference should be obvious.
In space, noone can smell your reek.
My humble apologies. You are correct.
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.. but no-one's actually forcing you to watch Jersey Shore.
LOL!
How does their mantra go, "Gym, Tan, Laundry, Braaaainss..."
Well, if you are what you eat, that can't be right.
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But but but, I want to dehumanize my neighbors to the point where I can treat them to shotgun blasts without feeling guilt.
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Just Let It Die
How? It's already dead.
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Morgan Freeman will outlive us all.
God is immortal you know.
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I, on the other hand, am content to have Samuel L Jackson reading my obit.
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I'd rather have one of his great, great, great grandchildren read mine.
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I know Halle Berry has millions of worshippers, but is she actually God?
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The epidemic has become so widespread that population experts estimate one in every five hundred humans has been zombified.
Reading comprehension is not one of your strong points?
not even known fictional scenario
Although not technically zombies, in "I am Ledgend" (movie and book) the infection spreads by air.
Can't refute point 2. But I think the epidemiology here is somewhat more complicated in all other cases. Can enough cure be produced to counter the spread? Can enough tests be produced? You you have enough bullets? What about Madagascar?
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"A zombie apocalypse with disease spreading through the air is not even known fictional scenario."
Isn't that how it works on The Walking Dead? Given that you turn into a zombie on that show if you die even if you were never bitten? That's the implication I took away from it - that it was an airborne disease that simply infects you and then turns you when you die.
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Does it drive away people who aren't bright enough to recognize a real world problem illustrated with an entertaining example but decide to bitch about it anonymously instead?
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Just because it's not intuitive doesn't mean it's not true.
Plenty of people already pointed out how this works above, try reading sometime, you can learn some amazing things.