chuggnutt.com

I realize I'm about a week late blogging this item (should have been around Halloween), but I just can't resist: Count Dracula not in the numbers, physicist says. A scientist is playing Scully to scientifically disprove the existence of monsters—vampires, zombies, ghosts, and so on.

Articles like this make me amused and irritated at the same time. I always get a kick of out it when a goofy, kooky topic like this shows up in the "serious" mainstream news, but it annoys me when they purport to have The Answer to things and get their science and logic wrong.

Case in point: his proof against the existence of vampires is flawed:

[Costas] Efthimiou takes out the calculator to prove that if a vampire sucked one person's blood each month — turning each victim into an equally hungry vampire — after a couple of years there would be no people left, just vampires. He started his calculations with just one vampire and 537 million humans on January 1, 1600 and shows that the human population would be down to zero by July 1602.

Now I'm not saying that vampires do exist, but that's weak. Yes, you've shown us that repeatedly doubling a number increases it exponentially very quickly, but this "proof" is hardly proof. First of all, why the assumption that vampires always make more vampires? If the vampire doesn't kill you outright, then you become a vampire. I think it's up to the "source" vampire. No exponential increase.

Second, couldn't some of these vampires be feeding on animals instead of humans? (Digression: wouldn't vampire cows be funny?)

Third, I'm sure vampires are reasonably intelligent enough to have figured out that if they keep making vampires, there's no more food left. I imagine they plan accordingly.

Fourth, where did this "one person per month" figure come from? That seems rather arbitrary.

So his reasoning is flawed. I think he would be better off arguing against the more implausible vampire myths, such as the physical impossibility of their not casting reflections in mirrors.

Or, you know, doing real science.

Compare and contrast this:

Global warming over the coming century could mean a return of temperatures last seen in the age of the dinosaur and lead to the extinction of up to half of all species, a scientist said on Thursday.

With this:

The earliest civilizations were not a product of favorable conditions but rather a last resort in the face of dramatic shifts in the weather, a climate scientist said on Thursday.

I'm trying to decide if these are complimentary or contradictory. Or maybe I'm just randomly amused, correlating the climate crisis faced in one article with the results mentioned in another...

...what we tend to think of today as civilization was an accidental by-product of unplanned adaptation to catastrophic climate change. Civilization was a last resort...

Interesting stuff.

A bunch of science links tonight. Kind of a year-end thing. First, as reported by the BBC, Science Magazine has compiled their list of ten key scientific advances of 2004. The top three are the Mars rovers finding evidence of water on mars, the discover of the Indonesian "hobbits," and the South Koreans announcing the cloning of human embryos.

The next link, via Slashdot, is this New Scientist article about Mt. St. Helens:

In late September 2004, a series of earthquakes signalled that the volcano was awakening. Since then, enough lava has oozed into the volcano's crater to build a dome the size of an aircraft carrier. The new dome, standing 275 metres off the crater floor at its highest point, is now taller than a nearby dome built by a previous set of eruptions over the course of six years.

"Something extraordinary is happening at Mount St Helens. We are scratching our heads about it," says Dan Dzurisin of US Geological Survey's Cascades Volcano Observatory (CVO) in Vancouver, Washington, US. The new dome has grown so quickly - almost four cubic metres every second - that it has bulldozed a 180-metres-thick glacier out of its way. If this rapid growth rate continues, there is a growing risk of a dome collapse which could trigger a major eruption, researchers warned at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Finally, via Boing Boing, The Top Cryptozoology Stories of 2004. These include the "hobbits" again, Ogopogo in Canada, and (good grief) Chupacabras.

Is this for real?

Scientists Finding Strange Life Forms in Great Salt Lake

With levels now at a 30-year low, the salt in portions of the shrinking lake has reached saturation levels ten times the salinity of seawater. Westminster, the University of Maryland and George Mason University are not only finding life where life shouldn't exist, but life, perhaps like nothing of this earth.

Instead of the rods, spheres and spiral shapes microbiologists are familiar with, they're seeing organisms shaped like pyramids, triangles, squares and crescents.

Dr. Bonnie Baxter, Westminster College Microbiologist: "Completely novel sequences that don't match up with anything in the databases. And one of our genome guys who was taking a look at these said this looks like alien DNA. It doesn't match anything we have on earth."