World War Z: Do Zombies Have A Half-Life?

And no, that wasn't (originally) intended to be a pun about zombies being undead, but whatever...

So, the World War Z book was fantastic. It's widely hailed as being one of the zombie properties that really, really thinks through th logistics of such an event, the potential science, the possible social implications, all the ways that humans might survive or react. For those of you who haven't read it, it's not a novel - rather, it takes the form of an anthology of stories, ostensibly collected post-zombie-control, about life during the zombie apocalypse. (If you've only seen the movie, or only read the book, it lost a lot of what made the book great in the adaptation process. Actually, in the adaptation process, it lost almost everything in the book period, except the title and the presence of zombies).

In any case, when people get into debates about the plausibility of zombies, most of the discussion centers around virology and epidemiology. What kind of virus could produce such an effect? What would the incubation period have to be in order for it to successfully spread?

Then, there's the question that always plagued me, the physicist: What about conservation of energy (and mass)? How long could a zombie keep on running, walking, shambling, or crawling towards its would-be victims and food sources? How long could a zombie trapped in a WHO lab with Brad Pitt and Peter Capaldi wander in circles until it literally ran out of energy?

First of all, we need to figure out the energy requirements of a zombie. Since I'm not a biologist and consider things like nutrition to be hand-waving magic (explain how else people can survive years of graduate school on mac and cheese, occasional free pizza, and alcohol!) I'm just going to plug numbers into online calculators until we get to something that we can use for the fun part.

The human body requires a widely varying amount calories a day, depending on the activity level of the person. Zombies have to have metabolisms, still - something has to convert those brains into energy to run around and bite more people, right? Granted, we can assume that a human's basal metabolic rate, or BMR, (that is, the calories spent doing things like powering smooth muscle, or keeping your body at a cozy 98.6 degrees fahrenheit, that even coma patients would burn) can be subtracted from that requirement because once you're a zombie, those body functions are kind of unnecessary.

For the purposes of this thought experiment, we'll assume that the zombie is a perfectly average American man, who (according to the CDC, which apparently know a thing or two about zombies) is approximately 5' 9" or 176 cm and 195 lbs or 88 kg. Because BMR calculations require age, I arbitrarily decided that this average zombie would be 30 years old. And frictionless, and a perfect sphere... also, we're gonna assume that a zombie metabolism converts muscle, fat, and organ tissue to energy just like a human metabolism, because we need a baseline from somewhere and we've got nothing else remotely useful.

Since I wanted to find an accurate BMR calculator, I eventually settled on this one on Wolfram Alpha, which gives a BMR of 1897 calories a day (or about 79 calories an hour), as well as caloric requirements for various other physical activity levels. Zombies that spend most of their time shambling around and not sleeping or resting at all in their endless quest for brains aren't "sedentary" or "lightly active", so subtracting BMR from those numbers, you get a consumption of between 1040 calories a day to 1700 calories a day.

According to the same super-useful Mayo Clinic page, it takes 3500 calories to burn a pound of fat. Since our perfectly average zombie also has a perfectly average body fat percentage of 23%, that means that he has about 45 lbs of body fat, which means that he's got 157,500 calories in his fat alone. That could sustain him from around 3 to 5 months, depending exactly how quickly and frequently this zombie moves.

Of course, once the zombie has metabolized all his fat, his body is going to move on to his muscle, and then start "digesting" its own organs until a human would die of organ failure. But, since Hannibal Lecter is considered an aberration instead of a nutrition expert, there's not much information I can find on how many calories are in a pound of human muscle (or heart or liver or whatever) right now - stay tuned for part 2 of this exercise once I figure that out!

Off-Topic: The Academy Awards

I'm going to keep it brief considering it was a 3-hour telecast...

The opening where Captain Kirk awkwardly kept telling MacFarlane he'd be the worst Oscar host ever? That was kind of prophetic. Since the list of things that merely fell flat, or were painfully awkward and/or bizarre (The teddy bear, anyone?) is too long, here's the short version:

Things that were overtly offensive:

• "We saw your boobs"
• The joke about eating disorders
• The joke about the show not being gay enough
• The joke about Quvenzhane Wallis having 15 years before she's "too old" for George Clooney

The actual funny things:

• The sock puppet "Flight"
• The intro for Christopher Plummer
• The time he simply said "The next presenter needs no introduction" and actually just walked off the stage without doing an introduction. (The presenter was Meryl Streep)

Entertaining moments that had nothing to do with MacFarlane:

• Jack Nicholson sitting in his usual seat
• The performance of "Goldfinger"
• A tie for Best Sound Editing
• Quvenzhane Wallis being freaking adorable
• Jennifer Lawrence tripping on the way to the stage
• Michelle Obama announcing the Best Picture winner
• That moment of suspense where we all wondered how it'd go over if Best Picture went to Zero Dark Thirty

Absolute worst moment unrelated to the show:

• The Onion's Twitter feed made MacFarlane look tame and inoffensive by comparison when they tweeted some 'satire' calling Quvenzhane Wallis (a nine-year-old girl!) the "C word."

So, yeah, that's it. I'm now an enthusiastic supporter of the 'Tina and Amy to host EVERYTHING!" movement again.

Books and Movies: City of Bones

So over two years ago, I picked up the City of Bones novel from the library, read it, liked it, and read the sequels, but there were only three books in the series (The Mortal Instruments) at the time.

Yes, a look at the cover makes it look like a cheesy romance novel aimed at teens, and yes, there is an endorsement from Stephenie Meyer on the back.

But, this book has less actual romance than any given chapter from any of the Twilight books and more action that the entire franchise, so it gets points for that. Also, it's got very good pacing - not only is there plenty of action, but what could have been a long, boring "infodump" is broken up into brief segments through the book - but the worldbuilding. Oh my god, the worldbuilding. If there's one thing that will make me fall in love with a series, or at least forgive more major flaws that I would otherwise, it's worldbuilding.

The book is set in New York City, with plenty of references to local geography, and the premise that some run-down or defunct appearing locations in the city were only an illusion to hide places with supernatural elements. And, the supernatural elements are plentiful and interesting for a fantasy book: There are the expected werewolves and vampires, and several other species, but so far every species has an origin that more or less makes sense within the universe. The weapons and magic are also creative, and seem to consistently follow rules.

The plot has a few predictable elements, although mostly from the heroic epic archetype (seriously, if you can't guess who Clary's father is by the end of the first bit history she hears, you must not have read much fantasy at all) but also a couple twists, and the dialogue is very believable for a YA fantasy, so while it's not amazing on the level of Hunger Games, it's definitely better than some more popular YA fantasies and most of what's on the CW right now.

So, back to the point, when a friend and I went to see Breaking Dawn Part 2 (yeah, I know) we saw a trailer for it, and it looked pretty awesome, so I went to re-read the books.

Then, my sister and I were chatting online, and we ended up discussing the beautiful human being that is Aidan Turner (as we often do when we chat online) and we looked at his IMDb page and discovered that he was actually in the City of Bones movie.

Which made us very happy. Then we saw that it had an August release date.

Shit.

In all of three years that I was working at a movie theater during late August, I cannot remember one good movie that was released during that time. Which is kind of discouraging, because really: Lots of interesting visuals, plenty of action scenes, and dialogue that's practically written to be onscreen? It seems like someone would practically have to try to make an adaptation of this that wouldn't be at least marketable and popular with teens in movie terms. One can only hope that the release date was not the studios resigning it to the dumping grounds of mediocre movies, but because someone decided that it was better to release it after the last Twilight movie and after SDCC 2013.

Well, I guess we'll just have to wait and see...

And now a few spoilery things!