A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

"You know, you don't act like a scientist."
"They're usually pretty stiff."

And none more so than physicists (sorry Greg):

It may be the season for vampires, ghosts and zombies. Just remember, they're not real, warns physicist Costas Efthimiou.

Obviously, you might say.

But Efthimiou, a professor at the University of Central Florida, points to surveys that show American gullibility for the supernatural. Using science and math, Efthimiou explains why it is ghosts can't walk among us while also gliding through walls, like Patrick Swayze in the movie "Ghost." That violates Newton's law of action and reaction. If ghosts walk, their feet apply force to the floor, but if they go through walls they are without substance, the professor says.

"So which is it? Are ghosts material or material-less?" he asks.

The fact that I remember anything about Ghost, multiple viewings of which have been proven to cause suppurative uveitis, sends me into a deeper funk than I ever known, but wasn't Swayze's struggle to learn how to become partially corporeal the whole fucking point of half that movie? If we're going to accept the premise that one's "life force" can somehow survive their physical death, then is it that much of a leap to say they can become intangible at will?

More to the point, does this count toward Efthimiou's publishing total?

Zombies and vampires fare even worse under Efthimiou's skeptical microscope.

Groan

Efthimiou takes out the calculator to prove that if a vampire sucked one person's blood each month -- turning each victim into an equally hungry vampire -- after a couple of years there would be no people left, just vampires. He started his calculations with just one vampire and 537 million humans on January 1, 1600 and shows that the human population would be down to zero by July 1602.

It's good to see that the University of Central Florida's requirements for expounding on folklore don't actually require you to read anything about the subject. Of course you'd run of humans, that's why vampires don't kill everyone they feed upon. Vampire authors from Stoker to…*sigh...Rice have gone through great lengths to explain that "turning" someone is generally a rare occurrence, while even popcorn movies like Underworld and the Blade series describe feeding strategies.

I eagerly await Efthimiou's condescending explanation as to why it isn't possible to graft metal to one's skeleton and how come spiders can't grow to be twenty feet tall.

"We're talking about a large fraction of the public that believes in subjects that scientists believe are out of the question," said Efthimiou. His paper is in an archive awaiting publication either in the journal Physics Education or the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, he said.

University of Maryland physics professor Bob Park, author of the book "Voodoo Science," said scientists have to keep telling the public what seems all-too-obvious.

"There are things that we need to point out that are crap," Park said.

What a fabulous idea. How about shelving the ghosts-and-goblins tirade and clearing up a few other things? Here, I'll start you off:

+ Intelligent design is not science
+ Neither is astrology
+ HIV is not an airborne pathogen
+ Abortions don't cause breast cancer
+ "Abstinence" =/= "sex education"

Get everyone squared away on those and you can bitch about George A. Romero all you want.