Maybe it was a slow day for the Freakonomics blog team over at The New York Times, or maybe it's an obvious ploy to appeal to younger, savvier readers.Either way, it works when "all the news that's fit to print" involves the walking dead's threat to the world.
Yesterday, the national newspaper of record included an item on the mathematical analysis by four Canadian mathematicians and grad students of a "hypothetical zombie outbreak to determine the likelihood of human eradication, should such an attack ever occur."
As any zombie lover who's read the Survival Guide worth his/her tasty brains knows, things don't look good unless a zombie outbreak is dealt with swiftly.
Still, although it's not groundbreaking news for the initiated, kudos to the Times for covering this. After reading the article, stick around for the comments, clearly the best part of the story. For instance, one statistically-inclined reader pointed out that the study uses a flawed model because it only presents "two outcomes for a human-zombie interaction: zombie destruction and human infection. They should have included 4: Zombie destruction, mutual survival, infection, and consumption."
Read the original study here.
-aaron sagers