Groundbreaking - and heartwarmingly unessential - research done by University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou has attempted to confirm what a generation of suicide girls has always feared - that vampires do not exist.
His reasoning? On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was just over 530 million people. If one vampire existed on that day and bit one person per month, and then each new vampire also bit one person per month, by 1605 the entire planet would be nothing except vampires.
Now, I am okay with there being no vampires, though I think the world would be poorer without that cinema classic, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.
And, without vampires, I would not be able to spend 4 seconds scouring the internet and find pictures like this:
So we can’t just let someone claim they have wiped out a millenium of folklore by doing simple ( very simple ) math. First, let’s deal with the premise behind his numbers. Professor Efthimiou’s research assumes that each vampire bite results in another vampire being created. People, if there’s one thing I know, it’s vampires ( and Thai transvestites, but hey, that is a post for another time ) and I need only point you to the definitive work on the matter, Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Yes, she looks as all women should look; like a sexy, zombie skeleton.
Additionally, back in 2000, in the British series Ultraviolet,
This was on TV, people. If you can’t believe what you see on TV, I can’t reason with you.
Professor Efthimiou’s simple and surprisingly jingoistic math and logic errors mean that there is still at least some statistical chance that vampires could exist. However, there is also some statistical chance I am a Chinese jet pilot. Yet, since the chance exists that vampires are roaming the earth, it can’t hurt to have a vampire slayer handy. Everyone goes for Buffy. I’d rather have a little Faith.
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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 12:12 pm and is filed under science, physics, culture, humor, blondes, vampires, goth chicks, buffy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 1st, 2007 at 7:18 pm
WORST SCIENCE JOBS
ORANGUTAN-PEE COLLECTOR
Their work is noninvasive—for the apes, that is . . . “Have I been pissed on? Yes,” says anthropologist Cheryl Knott of Harvard University. Knott is a pioneer of “noninvasive monitoring of steroids through urine sampling.” Translation: Look out below! For the past 11 years, Knott and her colleagues have trekked into Gunung Palung National Park in Borneo, Indonesia, in search of the endangered primates. Once a subject is spotted, they deploy plastic sheets like a firemen’s rescue trampoline and wait for the tree-swinging apes to go see a man about a mule. For more pee-catching precision, they attach bags to poles and follow beneath the animals. “It’s kind of gross when you get hit, but this is the best way to figure out what’s going on in their bodies,” Knott says.
SEMEN WASHERS
It’s a job that separates the boys from the men, OK, OK, their real job title is usually something like “cryobiologist” or “laboratory technician,” but at sperm banks around the country, they are known as semen washers. “Every time I interview someone I make sure I ask them, ‘Do you know you’ll be working with semen?’ ” says Diana Schillinger, the Los Angeles lab manager at the country’s largest sperm bank, California Cryobank. Let’s start at the beginning. Laboriously prescreened “donors” emerge from a so-called collection room that is stocked with girlie mags and triple-X DVDs. They hand over their deposit, get their $75, and leave. The semen washers take the seminal goo and place a sample under the microscope for a sperm count. Next comes the washing. The techs spin the sample in a centrifuge to separate the “plasma” from the motile cells. Then they add a preservative, and it’s off to the freezer, where it can stay for 20 years. Or not. Thanks to semen washers (and in vitro fertilization), more than 250,000 babies have been delivered in the U.S. since 1995.
“The hardest part is explaining it to friends,” Schillinger says. “But we do have stories.” Like what? “Like the donor who was in the room for the longest time. We had a big discussion about who was going to check on him. Turns out he thought he had to fill up the entire specimen cup.”
MANURE INSPECTOR
The smell is just the start of the nastiness. Almost 1.5 billion tons of manure are produced annually by animals in this country—90 percent of it from cattle. That’s the same weight as 14,432 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. You get the point: It’s a load of crap. And it’s loaded with nasty contaminants like campylobacter (the number-one cause of acute gastroenteritis in the U.S.), salmonella (the number-two cause) and E.coli 0157:H7, which can cause kidney failure in children and painful, bloody diarrhea in everybody else.
Farmers fertilize their fields with manure, but if the excrement is rife with E.coli, then so will be the vegetables. Luckily for us, researchers at the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety are knee-deep in figuring out how to eliminate these bacteria from our animals, their poop and our food. But to develop techniques to neutralize the nasty critters, they must go to the source.
“We have to wade through a lot of poop,” concedes Michael Doyle, the center’s director. “If you want to get the manure, you’ve got to grab it. Even when you wear gloves, the fecal smell tends to get embedded in your skin.” Hog poop smells the worst, Doyle says, but it’s chicken poop’s chokingly high ammonia content that brings tears to researchers’ eyes.
FLATUS ODOR JUDGE
Odor judges are common in the research labs of mouthwash companies, where the halitosis-inflicted blow great gusts of breath in their faces to test product efficacy. But Minneapolis gastroenterologist Michael Levitt recently took the job to another level—or, rather, to the other end. Levitt paid two brave souls to indulge repeatedly in the odors of other people’s farts. (Levitt refuses to divulge the remuneration, but it would seem safe to characterize it thusly: Not enough.) Sixteen healthy subjects volunteered to eat pinto beans and insert small plastic collection tubes into their anuses (worst-job runners-up, to be sure). After each “episode of flatulence,” Levitt syringed the gas into a discrete container, rigorously maintaining fart integrity. The odor judges then sat down with at least 100 samples, opened the caps one at a time, and inhaled robustly. As their faces writhed in agony, they rated just how noxious the smell was. The samples were also chemically analyzed, and—eureka!—Levitt determined definitively the most malodorous component of the human flatus: hydrogen sulfide.
DYSENTERY STOOL-SAMPLE ANALYZER
In the early ’80s, Virginia Tech profs Tracy Wilkins and David Lyerly studied the diarrhea-causing microbe Clostridium difficile in sample after sample after sample of loose stool from the disease’s victims. They became such crack dysentery docs that they launched a company, Techlab, dedicated to making stool-analysis kits. Today, Techlab employs 40 people, 19 of whom spend their working hours opening sloppy stool canisters and analyzing their contents in order to test the effectiveness of the company’s kits. You’d have to have a pretty good sense of humor, right? Well, fortunately, they do. The Techlab Web site sells T-shirts with cartoons on the front (two flies hover over two blobs of dung; one says to the other, “Pardon me, is this stool taken?”) and the company motto on the back: “Techlab: #1 in the #2 Business!”
BARNYARD MASTURBATOR
Researchers who want animal sperm —to study fertility or for artificial insemination—have a suite of attractive options: They can ram an electric probe up an animal’s rectum, shove an artificial vagina onto the animal’s penis, or simply do it the old-fashioned way—manual stimulation. The first option, electroejaculation, uses a priapic rectal probe to send electricity pulsing through the animal’s nether regions. “All the normal excitatory signals that stimulate ejaculation, like touch, sight, sound and smell, can be replaced with the current from the probe,” says Trish Berger, professor of animal science at the University of California, Davis. “It’s fascinating. Of course, this is a woman talking.” Electroejaculation generally requires anesthetizing the animal and is typically used on zoo dwellers. The other two methods—the artificial vagina, or AV, and the good old hand—require that animals be trained to the procedure. The AV—a large latex tube coated with warm lubricant —is used primarily to get sperm from dairy bulls (considered the most ornery and dangerous of bovines). The bull gets randy with a steer; when he mounts the steer with his forelegs, a brave technician, AV in hand, insinuates himself between the two aroused beasts and deftly redirects the bull penis into the mock genitalia, which he must then hold tight while the bull orgasms. (Talk about bull riding!) Three additional technicians attempt to ensure this (fool)hardy soul’s safety by anchoring themselves to restraining ropes attached to a ring in the bull’s nose. Alas, this isn’t always absolutely effective: Everyone who’s wielded an AV has had at least one close call, and more than a few have been sent to the hospital. The much safer “digital pressure” is used mostly with pigs, who are trained from an early age to mount a small bench while the researcher reaches around with a gloved hand and provides appropriate pleasure—er, pressure.
CARCASS CLEANER
Natural history museums display clean white skeletons or neatly stuffed animals, but what their field biologists drag in are carcasses flush with rotting flesh. Each museum’s taxidermist has his own favorite technique for tidying things up. University of California, Berkeley, zoologist Robert Jones swears by his strain of flesh-eating buffalo-hide beetles and has no problem reaching his bare hand into a drawer to pull out a rancid shrew skeleton swarming with thousands of these quarter-inch bugs. Jeppe Møhl at the University of Copenhagen Zoological Museum deposits sperm whales and dolphins into vast empty tanks and lets nature take its course. And then there’s the boiling method, useful for chemically preserved samples that bugs won’t touch—an approach favored by archaeologist Sandra Olsen, who has done her own skeleton work. She recalls a particularly vivid experience boiling down hyena paws: “It felt like inhaling the gases would literally kill us.” Nah. It merely gave her a lung infection.
November 3rd, 2007 at 1:33 pm
Vampires are real, I knew one. Go look up Narcissistic Personality Disorder and tell me that isn’t a fucking vampire!
November 3rd, 2007 at 4:12 pm
R U a VAMP?!? I vant 2 suk yur bloood….
November 10th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
you guys are no lifes there are no such a thing as vampires…oh yeah we humans have been lkiving for almost 3000 years and havent discovered 1 proff about vampires…wat are they? ill tell u….imagination…just like shake spear…there was no such a guy named shake spear ill tell ya that ….:D it is all a stupid make up
November 21st, 2007 at 11:29 pm
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article Scientific Bad News For Goth Chicks - Vampires Are Not Real, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
February 5th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Some people just can’t accept that there are things out there that we will never understand. Something had to start all those stories, right?
February 7th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Hi Lindsey,
Then I suppose something had to start the first story, Beowulf. Do you still believe in Grendels too?
March 13th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
We do not exist? I am sorry to disappoint you, but that is a lie. We can live amongs mortals because we learned to adjust and not feed from human blood. We are not what the media makes us, but one thing we are - REAL
March 19th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
if someone gets bitten by a vampire, that doesnt make them a vampire…. they have to drink the vampires blood to become one. soooo i wonder how much tax payers money that jerk scientist wasted just to make himself took like a jackass.
March 19th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
“if someone gets bitten by a vampire, that doesnt make them a vampire…. they have to drink the vampires blood to become one.”
Ohhhhh. Well, scientifically that makes a lot more sense now.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:43 am
It is true, 70% of all vampire myths say that you must drink the blood. There are people who genuinely need blood to survive because they have deficiencies, there is a specific name for them.
Now…as for the guy who said there is “no such guy as shake spear” well honey… I am sure that you are having difficulty keeping up, because you can’t even spell the bloke’s name let alone know whether he was alive or not. His name was William Shakespeare. For all people who love novels about sexy vamps, whether they are real or not I would like the reckomend the Circle Trilogy about Vampires taking over the universe. They are written by Nora Roberts. The first is named: Morrigan’s Cross, the second is named: Dance of the Gods, and the third is named The Valley of Scilence. There are shape shifters, queens, hunters, witches, warlocks and dragons. An there is a really sexy ‘Good’ vampire his name is Cian and his drives a black Jag. You’ve got to love him.
Personally I don’t care if they are alive or not, they make a good read, good costume and they are fun to fantasise about.
Some people believe in god, some in the devil, angels and even the boogie man. Wherever these stories come from they are a part of our society as much as Shakespeare’s literature, without them fantasy would be quiet dismal.