Applied Mathematics

Vampires are impossible, according to a physics professor at the University of Central Florida. Costas Efthimiou's debunking logic: "On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was 536,870,911. If the first vampire came into existence that day and bit one person a month, there would have been two vampires by Feb. 1, 1600. A month later there would have been four, and so on. In just two-and-a-half years the original human population would all have become vampires with nobody left to feed on. If mortality rates were taken into consideration, the population would disappear much faster. Even an unrealistically high reproduction rate couldn't counteract this effect."

Why science fact is cooler than science fiction

"Because they so rarely interact with matter we can shoot them straight through the Earth, and most will travel through without doing anything. Of course, most of them travel right through our detectors as well, but once in a blue moon one of them will interact – about one or so per day." – Dr Lisa Falk Harris, a particle physicist at the University of Sussex, on the nature of neutrinos.

Ian Melamed is an obliviot

What a load of SHIT! I had to generate a new blog entry to get this off my chest. Some monkey who claims to be a consultant has labelled the World Community Grid project a potential "powerful cyber-terror weapon". The article can by found here. He reckons that if "hackers manage to penetrate the super-network", it could be used for "sinister purposes".