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How That 'Extra .9%' Could Ward Off a Zombie Apocalypse
netbuzz writes "The questioner on Quora asks: 'When is the difference between 99% accuracy and 99.9% accuracy very important?' And the most popular answer provided cites an example familiar to all of you: service level agreements. However, the most entertaining reply comes from a computer science and mathematics student at the University of Texas, Alex Suchman. Here's his answer: 'When it can stop a Zombie Apocalypse.'"
The question isn't how to ward off the zombie apocalypse. The question is how could a zombie apocalypse realistically happen at all. Any explanation is a huge stretch.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
An example we were given in my Intro to Stats module once upon a time used the Space Shuttle Program.
The numbers following the decimal point are very important when it might mean the difference between a Space Shuttle failing catastrophically instead of leaving / returning through the atmosphere intact.
And the vast differences in manufacturing costs between a 99.9%, 99.99% and 99.999% fault tolerant component and why
it would be necessary in the bigger picture of the complete system.
A better answer; False positive medical tests.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Don't link to a blogspam site that rips off the entire original article's content - link to the original site.
This zombie fad is getting worn out. Just stop it, stop referencing it, stop producing zombie-related media, just STOP.
1. 1 in 500 infection rate was not included in the initial premise or anywhere in the article itself, but used in calculations in footnotes.
2. Decision, to administer or not to administer the cure in the case of zombie apocalypse was determined by an arbitrary criterion by an author. In reality, it would matter if the author calculated the possible outcome of detection and administering cure at maximum available rate, vs. spread of infection at its (supposedly proportional to the density of zombies) rate.
3. Zombie apocalypse is not a realistic scenario. A zombie apocalypse with disease spreading through the air is not even known fictional scenario.
This is how you DON'T WRITE THINGS, be they fictional, or non-fictional, and it's certainly how you don't write things that involve math.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Morgan Freeman will outlive us all.
God is immortal you know.
go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over.
This zombie fad is getting worn out. Just stop it, stop referencing it, stop producing zombie-related media, just STOP.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Is this supposed to get us interested in Quora? If so, it failed. If this is an example of the level of intellectual masturbation on Quora now I will continue to stay away from that boring site.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
"You can't justify subjecting 5 people to the negative effects of the cure in order to save one zombie, so your discovery is completely useless."
No. You would administer it and risk killing many healthy humans, because the alternative is certain annihilation of the human race.
The premise of the story is fine though. Although my zombie analogy would be the difference between a 99% chance of no zombie outbreak in a year vs. a 99.9% chance. The former would mean a 37% chance of a zombie free century. The latter would mean a 37% chance of a zombie free millennium.
It's probably of deep significance for cultural anthropologists where this zombie meme came from, but I'm actually sick&tired of the whole thing. Zombies == instant unfunny guarantee.
What's worrying is not so much that there's a stupid meme, but that people can even begin to try to rationalise it and behave as though it could actually happen.
Personally, I just think it's feeding the insane "survivalist" mentality that is spreading like a virus through the US. Oh, wait...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
putting it on completely different subject: if a filter stops 99% of pollutant, you get 10x pollutant unfiltered when compared to the filter with 99.9% efficiency and 100x than with filter of 99.99% efficiency.
I was with him until he said one of the perks of being the plague-stopping hero was having your biopic narrarated by Morgan Freeman, when I'd obviously much rather have Zombie Morgan Freeman doing the VoiceOver.
"Brains. My, my, my, some sweet delicious brains would be mighty fine indeed. Brains."
You know you just read that with Morgan Freeman's voice in your head.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
"Zombie" preparation is really just arming up against tough human opponents (what sort of humans can't be reliably brought down with a shot to the chest?) while keeping things light hearted and not all ruby ridge. Then the internet autists got ahold of it and took the zombie part seriously
I, on the other hand, am content to have Samuel L Jackson reading my obit.
I am officially gone from
Does it drive away people who aren't bright enough to recognize a real world problem illustrated with an entertaining example but decide to bitch about it anonymously instead?
...people can even begin to try to rationalise it and behave as though it could actually happen.
It's also an educational opportunity. I occasionally do mentoring, and I've used zombies as a good example for a worst-case scenario for emergency preparedness. It provides a good narrative to cover a wide variety of situations where everything's gone wrong, without entering into a ridiculous movie-plot-specific series of impossibly unlikely events. By starting out with the assumption that we're already in a worst-case scenario, where the survivor is one of only a few to survive an epidemic, it's not a terribly large stretch to assume that the car won't start, or that there's a storm coming, or that an earthquake has broken gas lines, and the survivor can't rely on government services.
Speaking of how impossible a zombie is, the zombie apocalypse also provides some ironically humane ways to discuss epidemiology, biology, medicine, and ethics, because pop-culture zombies are a convenient infection without suffering. The actual conversion process is rarely a focus in stories, and once the zombie is a zombie, they're too mindless to even fear harm. They just keep wandering, not even bothering to eat regularly... which brings us to discussing chemistry and thermodynamics.
Personally, I just think it's feeding the insane "survivalist" mentality that is spreading like a virus through the US. Oh, wait...
Jokes aside, we don't have any Communists or Nazis today to worry about, or Confederates, or British, or Spanish, or Visigoths, or Persians, or even rival tribes. We do have terrorists to fear, but there aren't any terrorists likely to launch a full occupation of the US. The survivalist mentality has always been here, but now we don't have any looming evil that we need to survive. While minor emergencies (such as those requiring the aforementioned preparedness) may happen, the barbarians aren't at the gate. They're in their living rooms, shouting insults into their XBox.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
That didn't work for George Burns
Ol' Rick Dawson had a farm EIEIO
I'd rather have one of his great, great, great grandchildren read mine.
It's also a wonderful stand-in for all aspects of a real Pandemic emergency.
It's really the perfect pandemic hypothetical, which is why you see people preparing for Zombie Apocolypse. (read: any and all eventualities resulting from infectious disease significant enough to halt modern civilization).
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I have to question their definition of 99% accurate for positives and negatives, where you test someone, it's positive, and somehow you only have a 16.6% chance of being right.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It's a useful hypothetical for training. For example, I just recently saw a bit of some TV show about firefighters, where they were trying to rescue a trapped person in a warehouse accident, and some worker there assured them none of the materials stored there were flammable. They got out an acetylene torch to cut the trapped person free of fallen shelves and such, and found out the hard way the worker was wrong. Zombie scenarios give the designer an excuse to present the trainees with lots of people who won't cooperate (i.e. the parents who have locked zombie Little Suzie in the basement rather than reporting her, hopeing it's just a phase she's going through), or who can't cooperate (the living but injured man who the trainees supposedly should identify as not a zombie even though he is blood splattered and staggering). There are plenty of other ways to craft a tough scenario, for example having some people play-act as though they don't speak any language the trainees try.
I've got mixed feelings about using zombies in training scenarios. First, the usual goal of such training is supposedly best met by 'tough, realistic scenarios', and zombies may add to the tough part but they certainly take away from the realistic part. Second, it involves dehumanising part of the problem set, so it's somewhat like older era military training, where the enemy was called gooks or ckinks or whatever. A realistic scenario might be a post-disaster confrontation with survivors who are from a minority population and that don't trust the civil authorities. Using zombie scenarios in such ways sends a seriously wrong message.
Who is John Cabal?
Let me make sure I have this correct, these guys wrote something to address 99% versus 99.9% applying it to a zombie apocalypse?
Are you kidding me?
Wow... so if I demonstrate 99.9% vs 99.99% vs 99.999% about the forthcoming alien invasion, would someone make a big deal out of that?
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
Just because it's not intuitive doesn't mean it's not true.
Plenty of people already pointed out how this works above, try reading sometime, you can learn some amazing things.
I think it sends the right message. IN this scenario, other people are not your friends. If you don't heed this warning or possibility, you will be one of the dead ones.
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"and I've used zombies as a good example for a worst-case scenario for emergency preparedness"
You use a scenario where the best way to survive is killing others. Pretty pathetic.
The people around need to be brought together and work for survival.
Train how to do that safely, and you have chance at long term survival of the tribe/species.
Every generation has barbarians at their gates, there are called 'kids'.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I know Halle Berry has millions of worshippers, but is she actually God?
The benefit of using zombies in a training scenario is that they are NOT part of any cultural group. Think political correctness - who can be ticked off about a training scenario with zombies? No one. Who can be ticked off by anything else you mentioned ? That's right - someone will.
And why just settle on one letter? Also have P-rings and Q-rings and R-rings etc. to cover more of the alphabet to distribute risk.
Table-ized A.I.
Zombies don't necessarily have to imply an each-man-for-himself festival of backstabbing. Zombies just make a nice set of boundary conditions and backstory.
Of course, these are plain old boring preparedness scenarios, just dressed up a bit. Rather than trying to justify that the survivor has to think for themselves by saying "911 isn't available in this area" or "there's a really bad storm outside", or "you were in a hurry and didn't load your snowmobile in your pickup truck", it's zombies. Zombies are just versatile stand-ins for the big bad anything, and they make the exercise a bit more memorable than a bog-standard lecture on preparedness.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Damn fine point. We should do Zombie Apocalypse war games in S Korea.
Ones wearing body armor or under the influence of certain drugs.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
As they say, lies, damn lies, and statistics.
His math is based on 1/500 (.2%) being infected. So you test 500 people and 6 people (1% of 499 + 99% of 1) test positive. But 5/6 of them are false positives and only 1/6 is a true positive (16%).
What about the 99% (495) that were found to be infection free? He wants to ignore that and pretend it has no value.
Consider this: You go out clubbing. There are 500 hot girls at the club and you know that 1 of them is a dude in drag. 99% of men have an adams apple but only 1% of women have adams apple (Hmm, maybe the zombie apocalypse is a more accurate scenario for slashdot...)
Anyhow, a girl asks if you want to hook up. If she doesn't have an adams apple, you know she's a girl. But if she does have an adams apple, there's a 16% chance she's a dude. You don't want to have sex with a dude. But if you accuse a chick of being a dude, she won't hook up.
Statistics guy would go home and masturbate. Real world guy would hook up with a chick that doesn't have an adams apple.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
What happens in risk assessment when you assume is that you have to state, justify and validate the assumptions (once they're more than a baseline level of assumption, such as "the laws of physics, as we understand them, will continue to apply").
Or perhaps you were just pointing out that my posts on /. don't go through the multiple levels of peer review and editorial review that my safety work does? :)
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
The term now is "prepper". We are prepping for the economic collapse. If the EBT system goes down millions of people will have no way to buy food. How long can the US government run trillion dollar deficits? We stock food for when the stores are emptied out and guns to keep non peppers away.