Swine Flu Over The Cuckoo's Nest
Ravi Mundoli -
Sunday, August 16, 2009 6:38 PM
That was going to be our team name for the Landmark Quiz that happened yesterday evening at the Music Academy in Chennai, until we changed it for highly obscure strategic reasons. We were quite lucky to scrape through to the Chennai finals, and then even luckier to sneak into the national finals by finishing second in the Chennai round. In the finals, order, balance and sanity were restored to the Universe and we came 6th or 7th per usual. Certain unmentionable person (who ceaselessly berates me about channeling quiz questions in this blog while concurrently writing a "blog" that consists entirely of quizzes) did very well indeed and won the whole thing. Expect to see highly annoying posts on how Rs. x0,000 in Landmark vouchers can be spent on that "blog".
There was a very real danger that the quizzes wouldn't happen because of the new H1N1 visa that seems to have been introduced in the recent past. Attendance was a bit thinner than previous years, but people still showed up in impressive quantities. Many team names were variations on the pigs flying theme, there were a couple of questions on it in the quiz and everyone had a jolly good laugh whenever there was a swine flu joke (but furtively looked very carefully at their neighbours to see if they looked like biological weapns). The organizers did their bit by handing out masks at the door to everyone, and at one point looking at the audience from the stage, it seemed like we were in some unscrupulous and gigantic operation theatre that had sold tickets to the public, for the pleasure of watching the finalists get skewered by the very learned and very classy Dr. Navin Jayakumar.
If it wasn't bad enough that the flu sounds like a visa category, things get hopelessly confused when the recommended mask happens to share its name with a popular mobile phone model. Some grumpy Google servers somewhere are probably sitting and cussing as searches for "N95" pour in and now suddenly they don't know which one is being sought.
The swine flu pandemic first made news in March in Mexico. The whole world emitted a collective high pitched screech at the time, health agencies went into overdrive and everyone was aflutter. Things quietened down a bit for several weeks while the world seemed to take a (N95 screened) deep breath, before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that it was a pandemic, and that there was diddly-squat that could be done about it. What I could not understand was how did they decide that this thing had achieved the critical mass it needed to make the spread unstoppable? What changed, how do these things grow and evolve?
Enter scientists! The very curiously named Dr. Robert Smith? (yes, the '?' is part of his name!) seems to work on the bleeding edge of the mathematics of infectious disease. Like the good scientists they are, Dr. Smith and his colleagues have written a paper (PDF) titled When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection. The abstract reads:
Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.
Fantastic stuff. How can it not be when the first line reads, "A zombie is a reanimated human corpse that feeds on living human flesh." and then goes on to such things as:
In addition, we assume the birth rate is a constant, K. Zombies move to the removed class upon being ‘defeated’. This can be done by removing the head or destroying the brain of the zombie (parameter ). We also assume that zombies do not attack/defeat other zombies. Thus, the basic model is given by
S' = PI - BetaSZ - DeltaS
Z' = BetaSZ + GammaR - AlphaSZ
R' = DeltaS + AlphaSZ - GammaR
This model is illustrated in Figure 1.
Warms the cockles of your heart to know that we are in good hands, doesn't it? Of course, this paper is not unique in it's quirkiness. Dr. Jason Brown's paper has rendered yeoman service unto music buffs by solving the mystery behind that distinctive first chord of the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night. He used Fourier transforms to ferret out the fact that there must have been a piano somewhere in rock and roll's most famous guitar chord!
And though it's not in the same league of rigour and correctness as these two, Alice Shirrell Kaswell's extraordinary contribution to that ineluctable, ineffable Mystery of the Universe, Which Came First - The Chicken Or The Egg? is phenomenally informative and inspirational.