New York Times ninth annual "Year in Ideas" issue

By at 1:52 pm Friday, Dec 11

The NYT Magazine's "Year in Ideas" issue is a fantastic collection of short, intriguing proposals, problems, and possibilities.
Zombie-Attack Science

Working with a professor and two other graduate students, Munz built a mathematical model of a city of one million residents, in which an outbreak occurs when a single zombie arrives in town. He based the speed of zombie infection on the general rules you see in George Romero movies: after getting bitten, people turn into zombies in 24 hours and sometimes don't realize what's happening to them until they change.

When he ran the model on a computer, the results were bleak. "After 7 to 10 days, everyone was dead or undead," he says. He tried several counterattacks. Quarantining the zombies didn't work; it only bought a few extra days of survival for humanity. Even creating a "cure" for zombification led to a grim result. It was possible to save 10 to 15 percent of the population, but everyone else was a zombie. (The cure in his model wasn't permanent; the cured could be rebitten and rezombified.)

There was only one winning solution: fighting back quickly and fiercely.

New York Times ninth annual "Year in Ideas" issue (Thanks, Daniel!)

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Mark Frauenfelder

My latest book, Made by Hand, now in paperback. Follow me on Twitter.

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