Ghosts, vampires and zombies

I recently came across "Cinema Fiction vs Physics Reality: Ghosts, Vampires and Zombies," by Costas Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi. This paper discusses how ghosts, vampires and zombies are portrayed in books and movies and looks at what's actually possible and what's not.

Ghosts have lots of problems with physics at a very basic level. They can't both be incorporeal and do the things that they are shown to do in books and movies. That should be fairly obvious.

Vampires have problems with the exponential growth of the vampire population that they would cause. I hadn't thought that before, but when you hear it, it's fairly obvious. Suppose that a vampire needs a single victim each year and that this victim then turns into a vampire. After one year, you have two vampires. Each of these two creates two more the next year. Each of these four then create four more the next year, etc. This growth quickly gets out of control and leaves the entire world populated by vampires. So the fact that people exist is proof that vampires don't exist, at least not vampires as they're portrayed in books and movies. (This analysis might not be quite accurate because it doesn't account for the ability of people like Kristy Swanson to keep the vampire population in check, but it's probably close enough.)

It turns out that there's actually a factual basis for zombies. Maybe this is why Brian Keene's zombie books are so popular. I'm personally more fond of zombie stories like Robert Bloch's "Maternal Instinct," but I seem to be in the minority in this particular case. Much like people who think that reading papers about the physics of ghosts, vampires and zombies is interesting.

And it's apparently not just physicists who worry about zombies. Lucy Snyder, the wife of Gary Braunbeck, one of the best horror writers in the world, has written a book Installing Linux on a Dead Badger and Other Oddities that tells why people in the corporate IT world should worry about them.

Here's what this fine book has to offer:

• "Installing Linux on a Dead Badger"
• "Authorities Concerned Over Rise of Teen Linux Gangs"
• "Your Corporate Network And The Forces Of Darkness"
• "Faery Cats: The Cutest Killers"
• "Graveyard Shift"
• "Dead Men Don't Need Coffee Breaks"
• "Business Insourcing Offers Life After Death"
• "Corporate Vampires Sink Teeth Into Business World"
• "Unemployed Playing Dead To Find Work"
• "Trolls Gone Wild"
• "The Great Vüdü Linux Teen Zombie Massacree"
• "Wake Up Naked Monkey You're Going To Die"
• "In The Shadow of the Fryolator"

There's also a book coming out soon that tells how Dante Alighieri was inspired to write the Divine Comedy, at least the Inferno part of it, by seeing the results of a zombie infestation. My copy should be arriving next week.

I'm sure that there's some way to make this relevant to information security, but I don't see it right now.