Slashdot Mirror
The Great Stanford Buffy Population Equilibrium Study
Suture writes "A PhD candidate in ecology at Stanford University has done an ecological analysis of humans and vampires in Sunnydale, the home of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
He took some initial assumptions on rates of population growth, vampire feeding, etc and plugged them into a differential equations model. What he got was an equilibrium human population of 36,346, and an vampire population of around 18, and furthermore the equilibrium is stable. His conclusion was that even though the show's designers are not ecologists, they managed to come up with ideas that actually made ecological sense.
Scroll to the bottom of the page to see a pretty cool spiral graph of human population vs vampire population."
I just found out that even if Angel were still on the air, Doyle would not be coming back. On Tuesday Glenn Quinn, the actor who played Doyle, died of unrevealed causes. More on this here.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
actually, vampires can have kids with humands. Angel did it in his TV series, causing quite a plot element.
Of course, it might be that vamps require a soul to be fertile...
I'm venturing on to a gray area of on-topicness, but...
For those of you who don't know, Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, also has another genre show called Firefly.
I just watched the latest episode (War Stories) tonight, and believe me when I tell you that if it hasn't aired in your timezone yet, you do not want to miss it. This one episode has got more character development, action (and I mean combat) and humor (and none of that slapstick stuff) than the entire season of Enterprise so far.
Again, if you like Buffy (and even if you don't), don't miss tonight's Firefly. This one deserves high ratings, but that can only happen if people know it's being aired. So now you know.
Did you think, at all, before you wrote that? What do you think "equilibrium" means?
In dynamics, an equilibrium point is a steady-state of the system: that is, a set of values for the system such that, if the system is set to that point, the system will no longer change.
What do you think "stable" means?
In this context, "stable" means that, if you move the system slightly away from the equilibrium point, it will naturally move back to the equilibrium point. On the other hand, an unstable system, when perturbed from the equilibrium point, will not return to that point.
So, for example, the point of an inverted cone is an unstable equilibrium point. I can balance a ball on it, and it won't go anywhere; but move it ever-so-slightly, and it will fall down. On the other hand, the bottom of a conical pit is stable; move the ball anywhere up from the bottom, and it will just fall back down again.
These are basic definitions for this sort of mathematics. It probably wouldn't hurt, under the circumstances, to assume the author knows what's he talking about, you know.
Bjorn Christianson
A stable equilibrium is one that's robust to little nudges - it tends to go back towards the equilibrium point all by itself.
An unstable equilibrium is more like a ball on top of a hill. It's in equilibrium because it isn't going anywhere; but the equilibrium is unstable because a small push will destroy this particular equilibrium permanently.
That's the concept underlying the big spiral graph, by the way.
Brian Thomas is a PhD candidate in ecology at Stanford University in California. He used MATLAB (running on a Sun Solaris 2.7 workstation and commanded remotely through Telnet) to manipulate equations and run the model. He'd like to thank Dr. Joan Roughgarden for teaching him the vast majority of what he knows about population dynamics, and he would be very interested in hearing your thoughts on this little treatise, because he is keen on spending a goodly portion of his career communicating science to intelligent but non-technical audiences (like you!).
It started with this comedian (Yakov Smirnov) who made jokes about the US vs. dead USSR right after the cold war. In particular the jokes would switch subject and object around the verb (which you can do by accident if you're Russian struggling with English). For example, "in South Cali, you can always find a party. In old Soviet Russia, the Party finds YOU!!!"
::coy smile::
In any case, this was picked up by Family Guy and The Simpsons recently, involving a russian language feature of one of those navigation computers in a car. I assume this is where the Slashbots picked it up. Trolls use it at the drop of a hat now, without thought.
I, on the other hand, am genuinely trying.
PS - The believe whole "insensitive clod" thing has an origin on British TV of yesteryear, and then later in crusty manpages and fortune files. It surfaces on slashdot because we're into that sort of crap. We spell demon with an æ (aelig) too!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Keep up, man. Spike got a soul at the end of last season.
Imagine a vampire grabbing someone from behind and sucking them till they pass out.
That's how they did it in Vampire:The Masquerade from White Wolf, furthermore, in that game, if a avampire licks the bite wound it closes quickly, hiding the evidence...clever...
Of course one may wonder how many Sunnydale vamps get a chance to feed before being staked...
Machine9dotNet
There has been no such announcement. TVTome, much like IMDB is a user updated service.
There are inaccuracies, and some downright lies in the case of this "announcement"
If you go into their forums, you'll find a lot of fans unhappy with just how many lies, and rumors are being reported as "news" over there too.