idealawg

"How to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse Using Science"

Click for a kind-of-fun Web page about zombies. (The speaker, although entertaining and informative, is an excellent example of the excessive use of rising inflection and gen Y speech habits such as using "like," "so," and swear words.)

Note: Click to watch Dr. Steven Schlozman, a great speaker on the neuroscience of zlombies.

Zombies upstage a routine public health bulletin from the CDC

As a true zombie-phile, I am very pleased to see the attention the undead are getting this week. Yesterday, the servers at the Center for Disease Control were taken down by the number of people viewing a clever announcement about zombies. From "Zombies Upstage a Routine Public Health Bulletin" (New York Times):

With a straight face, the normally staid health agency had posted a primer on how to prepare for an invasion of the brain-eating undead.

“So what do you need to do before zombies ... or hurricanes or pandemics for example, actually happen?” the post said. “First of all, you should have an emergency kit in your house. This includes things like water, food, and other supplies to get you through the first couple of days before you can locate a zombie-free refugee camp.”

The idea, said David Daigle, a C.D.C. spokesman whose portfolio includes disaster response, came up as they were discussing how to make the agency’s annual “It’s Hurricane Season Again” press release a little sexier.

“One of the communicators mentioned that when we were tweeting about Japan and radiation releases, someone tweeted back asking us if it could set off a zombie attack,” Mr. Daigle said.

He took the idea to the agency’s director of preparedness, Dr. Ali S. Khan, a specialist in infectious disease and a rear admiral in the Public Health Service.

“Most other directors would have thrown me out,” Mr. Daigle said. “He said, ‘Let’s form a Zombie Task Force.’ ”

Click to read the rest.

 

 

Ever met a zombie lawyer? Some questions for you

On many occasions, I have posted about Harvard's Dr. Steven Schlozman and his work with zombies. And I have also written about today's current fascination with zombies—they are very popular! Click for my posts about all things zombie (even cupcakes!).

As you might recall, Dr. Schlozman recently has written a novel titled The Zombie Autopsies. He's been interviewed frequently about this novel and about his fascination with zombies. In an interview last month for CNN, he said:

And as to why people like reading about zombies and watching zombies so much, Schlozman points to the impersonal nature of things in our society, from waiting in line in the DMV to being placed on hold on a call with a health insurance company.

Think about all the situations in daily life where you sense a general lack of respect for humanity, and zombies make a little more sense.

"The zombies themselves represent a kind of commentary on modernity," Schlozman says. "We're increasingly disconnected. That might be the current appeal."

Increasingly disconnected? Do you agree with that statement? Have you met any disconnected lawyers? (Over the years, I have met many, some only mildly along the zombie continuum, others nearly shambling.) How would you reconnect a lawyer? With what? And why? Is it possible that zombies are happy? Do you have an inner zombie?

Image credit: Laughing Squid.

 

Is our world increasingly populated by zombies? Psychiatrist Schlozman guesses perhaps so

The new book Zombie Autopsies is getting some good press. Here's an excerpt from an interview in USA Today of its author Dr. Steven Schlozman:

Q: You're the psychiatrist. Why do we love zombies?
A: The construct of the zombie — the mindless stumbling about — feels increasingly like our world. It feels like going to the DMV or like sitting on hold with your HMO and talking to a machine. What we increasingly characterize as modernity is increasingly disconnected and disembodied. It feels zombie-like.

And click to watch "Zombie Autopsies 101," a video in which Dr. Schlozman teaches us about our brains using the zombie's brain as a teaching tool.

Junior neuroscientist talks about the zombie brain

I have blogged several times about the talented and funny Dr. Steven Schlozman who teaches about neuroscience by looking at the zombie brain. Others are now following him in presenting that topic. For example, watch Bradley Voytek. Voytek's style is a bit rough, but I bet he will become more polished as he gives these kinds of talks in the future.

Wired picks its best interviews of 2010: Two are about zombies!

From Zombies, Sci-Fi and Alice: Wired.com’s Best Video Interviews of 2010:

Wired.com interviewed some really amazing people in 2010. We talked to director Tim Burton about Alice in Wonderland. We spoke to 127 Hours director Danny Boyle about working with James Franco (and a rock). And we got into sci-fi with Splice director Vincenzo Natali and Tron: Legacy cast and crew members.

Zombies were bloody big this year, too: We interviewed Robert Kirkman about The Walking Dead and talked with "Godfather of the Dead" George A. Romero, who practically created the genre. ...

Click to read the rest and watch all the interviews.

Click for past posts on zombies.

Discussion about the zombies in our midst: Do they celebrate the human spirit?

From "My Zombie, Myself: Why Modern Life Feels Rather Undead" (New York Times):

Mainstream interest in zombies has steadily risen over the past 40 years. Zombies are a commodity that has advanced slowly and without major evolution, much like the staggering creatures George Romero popularized in the 1968 film “Night of the Living Dead.” What makes that measured amplification curious is the inherent limitations of the zombie itself: You can’t add much depth to a creature who can’t talk, doesn’t think and whose only motive is the consumption of flesh. You can’t humanize a zombie, unless you make it less zombie-esque. There are slow zombies, and there are fast zombies— that’s pretty much the spectrum of zombie diversity. It’s not that zombies are changing to fit the world’s condition; it’s that the condition of the world seems more like a zombie offensive. Something about zombies is becoming more intriguing to us. And I think I know what that something is.

Zombies are just so easy to kill.

Zombie guru Steve Schlozman writes in The Boston Globe about the column from which the above quote came:

"Why our email addiction is 'turning us into lab rats feeding on pellets of social nourishment'"

I have been thinking of making a schedule for Twitter and Facebook. Maybe Twitter on Mondays and Fridays and Facebook on Tuesdays and Saturdays? This article from the Daily Mail walked me one step closer to that kind of plan.

Excerpt from :

Using the internet and an obsession with email is turning us into ‘lab rats’, an expert has claimed.

Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, said that information overload is stopping people form concentrating on tasks as they search for ‘pellets of social interaction’.

The non-stop information overload also makes it impossible to think deeply in a syndrome has been christened Divided Attention Disorder, or DAD.

Mr Carr, who wrote a book called The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, says that our basic human instinct to search for new information makes us addicted to our inboxes.

Many office workers check their email up to 30 times an hour.

Mr Carr told Esquire magazine: ‘Our gadgets have turned us into hi-tech lab rats, mindlessly pressing levers in the hope of receiving a pellet of social or intellectual nourishment.

‘What makes digital messages all the more compelling is their uncertainty. There’s always the possibility that something important is waiting for us in our inbox …[which] overwhelms our knowledge that most online missives are trivial.’

Click to read the rest of "Why our email addiction is 'turning us into lab rats feeding on pellets of social nourishment'".

Publisher set to issue ground-breaking new research into zombie phenomenon

Anyone who follows idealawg knows I post once in a while about zombies. Although I like to read the cultural analysts about why zombies have become such a hot phenomenon, I espcially like following how some neuroscientists, most prominently Dr. Steven Schlozman, are using zombies as a fun way to teach about brain science.

Schlozman has a new book coming out next year. "Author of Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk said ‘Dr Steve’s Zombie Autopsies will charm and excite a new generation into loving science.'" A good result, yes? Here's one writeup, which includes Palahniuk's quote (from Transworld Publishers):

Transworld Publishers are delighted to announce the exciting acquisition of the pioneering work of Dr Stanley Blum, as documented by Dr Steven Schlozman, to be published 14th April 2011.

It seems that renowned zombie expert Dr Stanley Blum kept a detailed record of the vital work that he and his crack medical team conducted in their desperate bid to find a cure for the epidemic that is devastating the world. Now released by the UN and WHO, this important book, called The Zombie Autopsies, reproduces Blum’s notes in full, complete with his detailed diagrams and illustrations of the anatomy of these horrifying creatures. While it doesn’t make comfortable reading, it is a vivid and compelling record of medicine’s race-against-time to find an answer, a cure, to the horror that is the zombie plague…

Acquired by Editorial Director Simon Taylor, he had this to say; ‘Dr Blum’s extraordinary, disturbing notebook could hold the secret as to how we, humankind, might survive the zombie apocalypse.
From what little we know, it seems Blum and his medical team made the ultimate, awful sacrifice. Now it’s up to us to ensure that this wasn’t in vain. His personal record of the work he carried out on the living dead is being made widely available for the first time. While reading it might require a strong stomach, it is vital we take note.’

Dr Steven Schlozman is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is one of the world’s few scientific experts on zombies, and lectures on the subject for the National Academy of Sciences. He was last seen in Boston, Massachusetts.

Author of Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk said ‘Dr Steve’s Zombie Autopsies will charm and excite a new generation into loving science.’

The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse by Dr Steven Schlozman will be published in hardback by Bantam Press on the 14th April 2011. 

Watch three neuroscientists talk with George Romero about zombies

At last month's ZomBcon, one of the panels was made up of three neuroscientists and zombie icon and filmmaker George Romero. You can watch and listen to their discussion at the blog of Bradley Voytek, one of the neuroscientists.