Andrew Gelman and George Romero:

In the absence of hard data, zombie researchers have studied outbreaks and their dynamics using differential equation models (Munz et al., 2009, Lakeland, 2010) and, more recently, agent-based models (Messer, 2010).

But mathematical models are not enough. We need data.

Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira:

Invariably, simple models and a lot of data trump more elaborate models based on less data.

So, follow the data.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Sense Networks:

We asked ourselves: with all this real-time data, what else could we do for a city?

Nightlife enhancement was the obvious answer.

Philip Munz et al:

We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.

Stop Worrying:

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Is it that bad, sir?
General Jack D. Ripper: Looks like it's pretty hairy.

Embrace the suck:

Wendell: It's a mess, ain't it Sheriff?

Bell: If it ain't, it'll do til the mess gets here.

How many zombies do you know?

Seth Godin:

It was a tremendous gift, this ability to choose.

The best part of college is that you could become whatever you wanted to become, but most people just do what they think they must.

Nature's editors, on BGI:

Are these budding scientists short-changing themselves by focusing so single-mindedly on one category of technical expertise in the shape of high-throughput genomic sequencing?

Would the slower, less tightly focused training provided by Western-style postgraduate study ultimately allow them to become more imaginative and creative in their research?

The answer is not clear-cut.

Nancy Andreasen:

If you're at the cutting edge, then you're going to bleed.

Louis Menand:

Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20's in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read -- and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.

Has American higher education become a dinosaur?

Mark C. Taylor:

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.

Marge Simpson:

Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

Ira Glass:

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Richard Sennett:

Doing a job properly takes the time it takes.

Alain de Botton:

Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to. We confront our lost energies in the pathos of the retirement party.

Decius:

Wow, life is boring.

Tom Henderson:

1) People use the average Joe's poor mathematics as a way to control, exploit, and numerically fuck him over.

2) Mathematics is the subject in which, regardless of what the authorities tell you is true, you can verify every last iota of truth, with a minimum of equipment.

Therefore, if you are concerned with the empowerment of everyday people, and you believe that it's probably a good idea to be skeptical of authority you could do worse than to develop your skills at being able to talk math in such a way that anyone can ask questions, can express curiosity, can imagine applying it in the most weird-ass off-the-wall ways possible.

Jules Dupuit:

Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

An exchange:

Flight Attendant: More anything?
Jerry Seinfeld: More everything!

Tom Henderson:

Many students want teachers to "show me the steps." But "The Steps" are cargo cult mathematics.

Mathematics is like unicorn anatomy. You imagine this thing, and it doesn't exist, yet it still comes with facts. I know how many legs a unicorn has.

Michael Osinski:

Oyster farmers eat lots of oysters, don't they?

The Philosophy of Punk Rock Mathematics

Dario Floreano and Laurent Keller:

Darwin suggested that adaptation and complexity could evolve by natural selection acting successively on numerous small, heritable modifications. But is this enough? Here, we describe selected studies of experimental evolution with robots to illustrate how the process of natural selection can lead to the evolution of complex traits such as adaptive behaviours. Just a few hundred generations of selection are sufficient to allow robots to evolve collision-free movement, homing, sophisticated predator versus prey strategies, coadaptation of brains and bodies, cooperation, and even altruism. In all cases this occurred via selection in robots controlled by a simple neural network, which mutated randomly.

Kacie Kinzer:

I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it?

More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself?

To answer these questions, I built robots.

Jay Keasling:

We have got to the point in human history where we simply do not have to accept what nature has given us.

Evolution of Adaptive Behaviour in Robots by Means of Darwinian Selection

Sarah Rodriguez, also known as Wolfie Blackheart:

I severed the head, boiled the head. People make the mistake of hacking the spine, which will fracture the skull.

You also have to put (the head) outside for the brains to leak out.

Lisa Rodriguez, Wolfie's mom:

I say, 'Don't sever heads in front of me.'

She usually does it in the woods.

Nathan Myhrvold:

I was describing this to a friend over lunch in Palo Alto. As I was describing this the waiter came up behind me to take our order. I was in the middle of saying "it's very hard to enter the rectum, but once you do things move much faster", only to hear the waiter gasp. Whoops. I tried to explain saying "well, this is about" but with a horrified look he said "I do NOT want to know what this is about! Some people are just not interested in natural history, I guess.

Joi Ito:

The map is as complex as reality, so why not just live in reality?

Jack Handey:

If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I'd say Flippy, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong, though. It's Hambone.

Self-described wolf woman severed lost dog's head

David Grann:

In cleared-away areas of the upper Amazon basin, researchers, using satellite imagery, have recently pinpointed a vast network of monumental earthworks, including geometrically aligned roads and structures, constructed by a hitherto unknown civilization.

Martti Paerssinen, Denise Schaan, and Alceu Ranzi:

It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. The combination of land cleared of its rainforest for grazing and satellite survey have revealed a sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society in the upper Amazon Basin on the east side of the Andes. This hitherto unknown people constructed earthworks of precise geometric plan connected by straight orthogonal roads. Introducing us to this new civilisation, the authors show that the 'geoglyph culture' stretches over a region more than 250km across, and exploits both the floodplains and the uplands. They also suggest that we have so far seen no more than a tenth of it.

Grann:

The latest discovery proves that we are only at the outset of this archeological revolution--one that is exploding our perceptions about what the Amazon and the Americas looked like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

Charles C. Mann, author of 1491:

I felt alone and small, but in a way that was curiously like feeling exalted.

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

Have you read Grann's The Lost City of Z?

Pre-Columbian geometric earthworks in the upper Purus: a complex society in western Amazonia

The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.

Decius:

There are certain basic pleasures of the ancient world that one has to work very hard to come by today. We've cut ourselves off from things that even our grandfathers took for granted.

Elonka:

When most people hear "fingerprints", they immediately envision an inky mess all over their hands, which aside from being embarrassing, would also be extremely inconvenient ...

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

The turbulence intensifies. The overhead luggage racks begin to rattle. "This is nominal," I think, and I am amazed once again at how skillfully humans normalize the lives they find themselves living. It is really what explains the success of our species, our ability to absorb experience, to engulf it with our minds and accommodate it, in conditions infinitely more grievous than a bumpy flight.

Anne Frank:

As long as you can look fearlessly at the sky, you'll know that you're pure within and will find happiness once more.

The Known Universe

Ever wanted X-ray specs or super-human vision?

Chromoscope lets you explore our Galaxy (the Milky Way) and the distant Universe in a range of wavelengths from X-rays to the longest radio waves.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Charles C. Mann:

I felt alone and small, but in a way that was curiously like feeling exalted.

Jonathan Rauch:

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day?

Anne Frank:

As long as you can look fearlessly at the sky, you'll know that you're pure within and will find happiness once more.

Chromoscope

From Amazon's Best of 2009, here's Publishers Weekly on David Grann's new book:

In 1925, renowned British explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett embarked on a much publicized search to find the city of Z, site of an ancient Amazonian civilization that may or may not have existed. Fawcett, along with his grown son Jack, never returned, but that didn't stop countless others, including actors, college professors and well-funded explorers from venturing into the jungle to find Fawcett or the city. Among the wannabe explorers is Grann, a staff writer for the New Yorker, who has bad eyes and a worse sense of direction. He became interested in Fawcett while researching another story, eventually venturing into the Amazon to satisfy his all-consuming curiosity about the explorer and his fatal mission. Largely about Fawcett, the book examines the stranglehold of passion as Grann's vigorous research mirrors Fawcett's obsession with uncovering the mysteries of the jungle. By interweaving the great story of Fawcett with his own investigative escapades in South America and Britain, Grann provides an in-depth, captivating character study that has the relentless energy of a classic adventure tale.

Here's John Grisham on "Z":

The great mystery of what happened to Fawcett has never been solved, perhaps until now. In 2004, author David Grann discovered the story while researching another one. Soon, like hundreds before him, he became obsessed with the legend of the colorful adventurer and his baffling disappearance. Grann, a lifelong New Yorker with an admitted aversion to camping and mountain climbing, a lousy sense of direction, and an affinity for take-out food and air conditioning, soon found himself in the jungles of the Amazon. What he found there, some 80 years after Fawcett’s disappearance, is a startling conclusion to this absorbing narrative.

The Lost City of Z is a riveting, exciting and thoroughly compelling tale of adventure.

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

Ben Fry:

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime.

Using the six editions as a guide, we can see the unfolding and clarification of Darwin's ideas as he sought to further develop his theory during his lifetime.

See also, the Darwin Correspondence Project:

The main feature of the site is an Online Database with the complete, searchable, texts of around 5,000 letters written by and to Charles Darwin up to the year 1865. This includes all the surviving letters from the Beagle voyage - online for the first time - and all the letters from the years around the publication of Origin of species in 1859.

Lee Alan Dugatkin:

It began as a small difficulty with honeybees. At first glance, it did not seem like the sort of complication that could sink a theory that many have characterized as the most important one that biology has ever produced. But it turned into a problem that troubled biologists, fascinated naturalists, engaged popular writers and the general public, and even worked its way into political discourse for the next 145 years.

From The World in 2009:

Someone once accused Craig Venter of playing God.

His reply was, "We're not playing."

The Preservation of Favored Traces