Something wicked this way comes...

Is everyone looking forward to the forthcoming Halloween? The 'All Hallows Evening' is at our doorstep and everyone is preparing for trick-or-treating, brushing off their scary costumes, renting horror movies, carving pumpkins and generally intending to have fun.

We were told that the apple harvest this year was enormous. Apart from making plenty of traditional apple pies and cider (ah, we all love that, don't we?), one can do the traditional Halloween thing - the apple bobbing. Apple bobbing is a very old tradition that dates back to the Roman conquest of Britain, when the old Celtic customs of worshiping the pentagram (yeah, this is right: many nations worshiped the five-pointed star, with the Soviets being the latest addition to that tribe) was fused with the new Roman tradition of fruit goddess Pomona (it is rumored that the Romans were actually the ones who introduced the apple tries to Britain after all). You see, when the apple is cut, a pentagram-shaped form is revealed. Thence, apples gained respect and popularity among the Celts and have been consumed in a pie or as a cider ever since. This is quite interesting, since the Romans preferred their wine and never learned to fiddle with their apples so much. 
Anyways, apple bobbing is a game when the large tub is filled with water and several apples are left floating on the surface. The players try to catch the apples with their teeth (which makes this game not very hygienic and thence not very attractive to some people), while they also try not to fall into the tub (unfortunately, this happens sometimes, as for example in Agatha Christie's 'Hallowe'en Party', in which poor Joyce Reynolds drowned in the tub). 

Well, as the Halloween approaches, we are glad to announce that we also have a Halloween gift for you. Hereby, we are glad to present the recent fruit of our supernatural economics activities: in November a journal called 'Modern Economy' will publish our article (co-authored by Dr. Welkins). The article that is a study investigating the possibility of peaceful co-habitation of humans and vampires, can be downloaded here. Read and enjoy! There is more to come, of course, and we will be posting some other interesting and scary things right before Halloween! Stay tuned, stay away from the tubs and follow 'Supernatural Economics'!

WS and EL

Karl Marx: Vampire Hunter?

Karl Marx: Vampire Hunter?

Did you know that the works of Karl Marx and his followers are full of mentioning of vampires? It has been calculated that Marx used the vampire metaphor at least three times in Capital. For example, in one of the cases Marx describes British industry as “vampire-like” which “could but live by sucking blood, and children’s blood too”. Here is another quote: "“Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks".

Marx’s colleague and long-time sponsor Frederick Engels also used the vampire metaphor in his works and public addresses. In one of his works entitled The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels identifies and blames the “vampire property-holding class” as the source of "all the social troubles".

Marx’s and Engel’s perception of vampires corresponds very much to the recent Hollywood film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter directed by Timur Bekmambetov. In the film, based on the eponymous book by Seth Grahame-Smith, the 16^th president of the United States leads a secret life of a vampire hunter searching and destroying vampires. Vampires in the film supported slave trade and intended to start the Civil War to conquer the North and enslave all American population. In his secret diary, Abraham Lincoln writes that those vampires are “virtually everywhere” - layers, bankers, shop owners, in short the bourgeoisie accused by Marx and Engels of blood thirst.

Marx described vampires’ habits, their greediness and their lounging for blood in such a detail that in many cases it crossed the boundaries of the mere metaphor. Although many researchers perceive Marx’s vampires as metaphoric abstract bourgeois bloodsuckers feeding on working people, his knowledge of vampires is very peculiar. In one particular case, when describing Wallachian peasants performing forced labour for their boyars, Marx refers to one specific “boyar” who was “drunk with victory” and who might have been no one but Wallachian prince Vlad (called “The Impaler”) – or Count Dracula himself!

All this is very interesting because the best-known novel of vampiric genre, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, did not see the daylight until 1897, the whole 14 years after Marx’s death. Surely, one can place the Marx’s metaphor in the wider context of nineteenth-century gothic and horror stories which were abundant these days, and of which Marx was a huge fan. On the other hand, one might assume that some of the vampire legends were true and Marx and his contemporaries were aware of that.

Recommending you a new book on vampires: Emily Welkins' "Till the last drop!"

Dear Followers,

We are glad to announce that a fellow researcher, Dr Emily Welkins, published her book entitled "Till the last drop!" on what she describes as "modelling peaceful co-existence of vampires and humans.

The book is a real guide to vampiric lore (all you need to know about vampires and were afraid to ask, so to speak :)) It is a mixture of a research paper and popular science literatere and it will make you an expert on vampires (and not just the one who knows how to use silver bullets and garlic, but that kind who would be able to juggle (and fiddle) with numbers, quote respectful sources and amuse (and startle) your friends with a deep knowledge on vampyrism.

Read what one of the the readers wrote in her review of the book:

"If vampires were real and were planning their debut or coming-out party,this would probably be the book that they would cite to get everyone thinking about a peaceful co-existence. Maybe they are planning to show up spontaneously. Science and progress these days are far beyond imagination. Artificial blood may be invented soon (then there would be no reason for vampires to hide any more!).

I thoroughly enjoyed reading "Till the last drop!", especially because I am a fan of watching vampire films and TV series (I knew all the
book's popular cultural references!). The tone of the book is interesting: sometimes comedic and sometimes dry ... but this balances out well and keeps interest levels high.

I highly recommend this book! Congratulations on a job well done, Emily Welkins!"

We greatly recommend this book to you too!

Best regards,

WS and EL

Lunar phases and crimes: do werewolves exist?

For quite some time now, scientists have been wondering whether there has been any connection between phases of the moon and crime rates. Moon, by some accounts, is massive object in the sky that affects, for example, the cycle of tidal waves or the growth of plants. Some mentally unstable individuals claim to be attracted by the full moon, others experience sleep disorders and anxiety. Artists are fascinated by the full moon and its depiction might be found on many famous works of art (for instance, Van Gough's). There have been many recorded cases of sleepwalking caused by what doctors believe to be the change in moon cycles. For many people the causality is straightforward: the moon attracts the Earth's waters and governs its seas' and oceans' tides and because human body consists of 80% of liquids, why should not the moon attract these liquids too?

There are lots of studies dealing with what is called “the lunar effect”. For instance, Templer, Veleber, and Brooner (1982) claimed in their study that an unusual number of traffic accidents occurred during the evenings right around the full and new moons (although later the same researchers came up with an explanation that during the time period covered in their study a disproportionate number of full and new moons felt on weekends and traffic accidents are always higher on weekends). A study of homicides in Dade County, Florida (Lieber and Sherin, 1972) found an upsurge in killings in the 24 hours before and after the full moon. Other researchers, however, argued that the Dade County researchers employed dubious statistical methods (when the numbers were reevaluated, the pattern disappeared altogether).

Rotton and Kelly (1985) conducted a meta-analysis of 37 studies of the moon's effect on things like psychiatric admissions, suicides and crime (they called it BILE (Belief in Lunar Effects)). The researchers found that the moon accounted for no more than 0.03 of 1 percent of the monthly variation. The results of the BILE study indicated that there was a greater belief in lunar effects in the older participants than in the younger ones. The researchers also determined that belief in lunar effects appears to be based on age and not on social class or education. Another study (Jorgenson, 1981) concluded that persons with an external locus of control were more likely to believe in lunar effects on human behavior than would persons who possess an internal locus of control. Rotton, Kelly, and Elortegui did a follow-up study in 1986 to determine if belief in lunar effect on human behavior was more predominant in police officers and people working in psychiatric areas than among other people. It turned out that police officers exhibited a high belief in lunar effect as opposed to a lower belief by regular people. However, psychiatric care workers did not seem to give any credit to lunar effect. The explanation might be that they were influenced by articles in recent scientific journals regarding research being done in this area.

Most recently, Leflet (2009) examined a correlation between lunar phases, criminal activity and crisis calls. He conducted a study of individuals arrested by law officials and emergency calls made within the St. Joseph, Missouri area for a two-month period beginning July 17, 1999, and ending September 12, 1999. On the basis of the study, he concluded that common folklore concerning the effect of the changes in lunar phase and human behavior is unsubstantiated. However, the study had one limitation: namely that the observation period was conducted for two months, which is a relatively short period of time.

In spite of all that, there definitely should be some connection (and it probably is), however our story twists here to examine a quite more bizarre causality. We would like to look at the available data of crime rates for various countries and by comparing and matching the crime statistics (especially murder statistics) with phases of full moon try to answer the question: Would the existence of werewolves be possible in the world we live in?

Unlike vampires, werewolves are far more primitive creatures by all accounts. They ravish in the depth of the forests, kill animals and people and their bite might turn a human into a werewolf. In addition, unlike vampires who are in that state permanently, werewolves do not differ from humans most of the time. Turning into a wolf (or a beer or a jaguar) is triggered by the full moon and usually happens once a month. According to the most of the accounts described in popular literature, comic books and films, many werewolves do not actually know they are werewolves because their memory is gone every time they transform themselves from their human to their animal form and back (see Jack Nicolson's "The Wolf").

It is not completely clear how they multiply, although the werewolf gene might be transferred by bloodlines (see Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight Saga” for instance). Therefore, for the purpose of this research we can assume that the only way werewolves might strengthen their numbers, is by biting humans and turning them into werewolves. In most of the cases, however, werewolves kill their victims.

Therefore, a sudden surge in crime rate during full moon phases in various countries, controlled by the place of occurrence (forested areas might be the best candidate for werewolves’ appearance), might provide us with a good lead in our attempt to answer the question about the existence of such creatures as werewolves.

We are going to give it a thought (and conduct our research using all available data we will be able to get our hands on) and inform all our blog readers about our results soon.

Keep reading our blog and see you later, alligators (or werewolves)?

Flu season, vampires and diseases

Down with a flu :( Not a very pleasant thing to encounter, that is for sure. We are sure you all know that feeling when you feel terrible, have to stay at home, drink huge quantities of hot tea and you seem to hate everyone and everything (including yourself) for getting sick.

The disease (and watching a superb, all-stars (ah, Gwyneth Paltrow dies too soon but keep coming back throughout the film :)) medical thriller “Contagion” recently) made us to sit down and write some considerations about human population and diseases. Remember vampires from our previous posts? Well, they too can be regarded as a form of a disease (well, sort of). See our recent paper about that to find that out.

Remember how not long ago the world media announced that the human population reached the 7 billion mark? Although already quite high, we think that this figure could (and possible should) have been much higher. Our calculations of projections for human population growth show that there is some hidden factor that comes into the picture and prevents human population from growing exponentially. Tossing wars and natural disaster aside (however gruesome and unfortunate, they cannot be blamed for as major responsible factors), all evidence suggests that there must be infectious diseases that bear the whole burden of responsibility. Throughout its known history, humanity has lost about million people to various infectious diseases and it is still counting.

According to Worldometers, human population has grown considerably in the last two thousand years. The industrial revolution became a milestone for the giant leap in the size of world’s population. By 1800, the population of Earth had reached 1 billion. It had added another billion within 130 years (1930) and the 3rd billion within the next 30 years (1959), 4th billion within 15 years (1974), 5th billion within 13 years (1987), and 6th billion within 12 years (1999). For just 40 years, from 1959 until 1999, the world’s population has doubled from three billion to six billion. And finally, on Halloween 2011 mankind reached its 7th billion, the process that took just 12 years.

Today, the world’s population is growing at a rate of about 1.15% per year. The rate of growth reached its peak at the end of the 1960s, when it reached the level of 2%. The rate of population growth is due to decrease in the next few decades. However, the average annual change in population is estimated to be at a rate of more than 77 million people. It is a widely-accepted concern today that the world’s population will set itself at slightly above 10 billion after 2200.

As seen from the examples above, the world’s population grows at a high rate. The Malthusian law states that small populations typically grow exponentially (especially in the absence of threatening natural enemies). Applying this law to the human population would mean that mankind that lives in a comfortable built environment it has created for itself and is not threatened by any natural enemies will grow progressively and abundantly.

Assume that the world’s population is to follow the exponential growth rate and by the beginning of 2012 will reach 7 billion people. It seems logical to assume that the exponential phase in the growth of our planet’s population started at the moment the first civilizations formed themselves (i.e. mankind stepped onto the certain level of socialization that allowed for the reproduction of the human species regardless the caprices of nature). It was scientifically proven that the first civilizations on Earth were those dating back to around 8000 B.C. (e.g. Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Helenian, Minoan, Indian and Chinese civilizations). Quite curiously, only Indian and Chinese civilizations have remained in existence until today, all others went extinct. This might lead to the conclusion that there was indeed a factor hampering the exponential growth of the human population throughout the ages.

About 10 thousand years ago the population of Earth was about four million people. A simple calculation of the annual growth rate of Earth’s population in accordance with this dynamics yields the number 0.075%. This is 15 times less than the average population growth in 2010. It is obvious that there is some hidden factor preventing human population from the explosive growth. Amongst such factors one can come up with wars, famines, natural disasters and diseases. Even though wards, famines and disasters can no doubt be gruesome and bloody, there are infectious diseases that the world accounts the most victims for. Let us look closely at the history of some known infectious diseases to support our argument with facts and figures.

Human history is full of infectious diseases that would leave tens of thousands and more dead. The diseases were caused either by bacterial infections or by the viral ones and humans can call themselves lucky for not dealing with the most effective killers – the most efficient diseases usually kill their hosts too quickly. And if the disease eliminates a human before it can move on, it will die out itself.
According to Jared Diamond, human history is full of diseases that once caused terrifying epidemics but then disappeared without a trace. The so-called “English sweating sickness” that raged in 1495-1552 and killed tens of thousands but then disappeared without a trace might be one of the examples. Another example might be the “sleeping sickness” (which became known as “Encefalitis letargica”) which appeared in 1916 and quickly spread up in Europe and America. In 10 years the disease killed 10 million people but then vanished completely.

While most of the diseases caused by bacteria can be cured with antibiotics, viral diseases prove to be more dangerous and unpredictable. Viruses are so small that only the invention of electronic microscope in 1943 allowed scientist to take a good look at them. Viruses are inert and harmless in isolation but when put in action they react and multiply quickly. There 5 thousand types of viruses that are known to science: from flu and cold to smallpox, Ebola, polio and HIW. They prove to be very dangerous human killers: smallpox alone killed 300 million people on Earth in the 20th century.

The worst epidemic in history is often called “The great swine flu epidemic” or the “The Spanish flu epidemic”. WWI killed 21 million people in 4 years. Swine flu did the same in its first 4 months. According to Bill Bryson most 80% of American causalities in WWI came from Spanish flu (in some units the mortality was around 80%). Swine flu arose as a normal flu in a spring of 1918 but mutated into something more severe. A smaller proportion of victims suffered only mild symptoms but the rest became very ill and quickly succumbed (their suffering lasted from several hours to several days). The first deaths in the U.S. were amongst sailors in Boston in August 1918 but the epidemic quickly spread throughout to the whole country. Between the autumn of 1918 and spring 1919 549 152 people in total died in the U.S. In Britain, the toll was 220 000 with the similar numbers of deaths in France and Germany. Some estimates put the world toll from Spanish flu at between 20 and 100 million (due to the poor statistics from the Third World).

Therefore, the role of infectious disease is devastating for human population growth. Many sources show that most of the infections diseases might put human population in great danger. Infections spread violently like vampires in our model. If scenarios shown in most of vampire films were real, pretty soon the world would have been taken by vampires (unless some conditions outlined in our paper on a symbiosis of humans and vampires would be established allowing humans and vampires to co-exist peacefully). The only answer was (and still is) quarantine, isolation and (if available) vaccination are a must before most of the population is whipped out by a disease (or humanity becomes an endangered spices according to the IUCN definition).

The role of diseases in human population dynamics and growth cannot be underestimated. Slower growth of human population than the one predicted by our mathematical models might be attributed to the existence of diseases that act as a hidden factor in human population spread over the globe. These diseases, however, might be a good thing because they keep the world from overpopulation and therefore almost sure extinction.

So, be careful and do not catch anything! Hope our disease is not the one from “Contagion” so our recent paper about human population and diseases is not our last one :) We will keep you posted!

True blood and vampire-like bacteria

Good day everyone,

There are a couple of things from the scientific world we would like to share with you. Science means progress and progress means that even the most fantastic things might be once explained and put into practice.

The first thing is that we might be just a step away from vampires revealing themselves to us (at least in accordance with the logic of Charlaine Harris’s “Sookie Stockhouse series” and “True blood” TV series that is inspired by it). The news is that according to researchers from Edinburgh and Bristol Universities who for the first time made thousands of millions of red blood cells from stem cells we might be able to produce industrial scale quantities of blood in about two years from now.

Are you excited? Want to meet your own Bill Compton? Wonder how the “True blood” tastes? According to Bill, it was nothing special – your actual human blood is better.

The second thing is that according to “Discover” magazine, scientists found a strange micro-organism (bacteria, in fact) that behaves like a vampire. Read the article for yourself and think about it in that way: if there are vampires at this primitive, small-scale level, why cannot they be at the macro-level, e.g. living amongst us? Science seems to come with more and more facts supporting this idea!

Co-existence of humans and vampires scientifically proved

Happy Halloween everyone!

So, what are your plans for tonight? Go out to a part costume party with friends? Do trick-or-treat in your neighbourhood? Whatever you are up to, be careful – you might run into a vampire! And we are not talking about this colleague in a Dracula costume (oh, we love those fake fluorescent plastic fangs). We mean a REAL vampire.

The thing is science cannot prove the existence of vampires but it also cannot deny it. As we show in our paper, under certain provisions and assumptions, the co-existence of humans and vampires might, after all, be a reality.

Remember our quiz from the first blog entry? Who, to your opinion, described the co-existence of humans and vampires in the most accurate way? We listed the following options:a) Bram Stoker b) Stephen King c) Stephanie Meyer d) Charlaine Harris

And the correct answer is: both c) and d) are correct!

In our paper we show this on the example of what we call “the Harris-Meyer-Kostova model” (based on Charlaine Harris’s “Southern Vampire Series”, Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight saga” and Elizabeth Kostova’s “The Historian”). The model allows for the peaceful (and totally unnoticeable) existence of vampires in our world. However, the system is very fragile and some coordination is required to keep things in balance.
Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight series”, Charlaine Harris’s “Sookie Stockhouse (Southern Vampire) series”, “True Blood” (TV series) and Elizabeth Kostova’s “The Historian” show the world where vampires peacefully co-exist with humans.

In Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight series” vampires can tolerate the sunlight, interact with humans (even fall in love with them) and drink animals’ blood to survive. Of course, they have to live in secrecy and pretend to be human beings.
In “Southern Vampire (Sookie Stackhouse) Series” (and the TV series “True Blood” which is based on it), however, a world is shown where vampires and humans live side-by-side and are aware of each other. Vampires can buy synthetic blood of different blood types that is sold in bottles and can be bought in every grocery store, bar or gas station. They cannot walk during daytime, so they usually come out at night. Humans also find use of vampires’ essence – vampires’ blood (called “V”) is a powerful hallucinogenic drug that is sought by humans and traded on the black market (sometimes humans capture vampires with the help of silver chains or harnesses and then kill them by draining their blood). Some humans seek sex with vampires (vampires are stronger and faster than humans and can provide superb erotic experience). There is a possibility to turn a human being into a vampire, but it takes time and effort.
In Elizabeth Kostova’s novel “The Historian”, vampires are rare although real and do not reveal themselves to humans too often. Their food ratios are limited and they spend lots of time brooding in their well-hidden tombs.
In addition, “Sookie Stackhouse (Southern Vampire) Series” by Charlaine Harris comes with an interesting concept of vampires “coming out” in the 2000s: vampires have ultimately decided to reveal themselves to humans (a concept totally unacceptable in the works of Stephanie Meyer) and co-exist with them peacefully exerting their citizens’ rights. Let us show you really quick how the co-existence of humans and vampires works in our model.

Assume that at the time of the events described in the first book of the series, “Dead Until Dark” (2001), the world’s vampire hypothetical population was around five million (the population of the state of Louisiana in 2001). The initial conditions of the Harris-Meyer-Kostova model are the following: five million vampires, 6 159 million people, there are organized groups of vampire “drainers”.
Our calculations show that the human population will be growing until 2046 when it reaches its peak of 9.6 billion people, whereupon it will be declining until 2065 until it reaches its bottom at 6.12 billion people. This process will repeat itself continuously. The vampire population will be declining until 2023 when it reaches its minimum of 289 thousand vampires, whereupon it will be growing until 2055 until it reaches its peak at 397 million vampires. This process will also repeat itself continuously. Therefore, under certain conditions, the Harris-Meyer-Kostova model seems plausible and allows for the existence of vampires in our world. Co-existence of two spices is a reality. However, this symbiosis is very fragile and whenever the growth rate of human population slows down, the blood thirst of vampires accelerates, or vampire drainers become too greedy, the whole system lies in ruins with just one population remaining.

Well, do you believe now that vampires MIGHT exist? Even if you still do not, watch out anyways – it is Halloween tonight.

And back to vampires again...

By the way, (as we have already mentioned) we are not the only scientists dealing with the vampirical theme. Quite often, other colleagues turn to this topic in their own research under the influence of popular films (they are so irresistible, we all know that) and literature – after all, it is hard to refrain from using your analytical mind in solving the puzzles of the supernatural.

Academic research on vampires was also done by the two mathematicians from Technische Universitat Wien in Vienna, Austria. Richard Hartl and Alexander Mehlmann published several papers explaining, among all, the problem of renewable resources (us humans!), optimal blood consumption and cyclical bloodsucking behavior for vampires. In the 1992 paper published in the Journal of Optimization Theory and Application, the authors present a theoretical model explaining what they call “cycles of fear”. Their model provides an alternative approach to traditional demographic oscillations associated with studying interactions between vampires and humans (they use a controlled Lotka-Volterra type of system and introduce an optimal choice of consumption).
Although quite mathematical and full of formulas that might be too challenging for mainstream vampire-lovers, the paper does not lack a certain sense of humor (for example they state that the use of optimal point control theory (the one that applies Pontryagin’s principle requiring the derivation of a shadow price for vampires) is questionable because vampires cast no shadow).

Whether explained through mathematics or not, most academic papers on vampires do not deny the existence of vampires as such. It is just all about optimal strategies and behavior for vampires who need to take care and do not expose themselves too much to humans.
Later, we are going to show that our research also provides grounds for the existence of vampires among us. And, quite interestingly, some writers and film-makers know a great deal about it and describe the vampiric behavior and optimal strategies with stunning precision. Do they know some vampires? Is this why they can tell us about them so much?

Read our blog and find out more about supernatural economics. Happy Halloween! :)

Vampires among us

And now back to the vampirical theme again. Have you ever wondered whether vampires could actually LIVE amongst us?

Although their existence is possible (at least from the scientific point of view), as it was mentioned in the previous post, one may ask why we do not see them or meet them every day. One possible explanation might be that they are well-hidden in their coffins or hide-outs and only come out at night. Another explanation might be that they are so scarce, that a chance of meeting a vampire is practically equal to zero.
However, some individuals we occasionally meet DO make us think that the argument is not lost and that vampires are among us. There are lots of them among economists and mathematicians (especially our colleagues).

In particular, there is one certain gentleman we know, a Director of a respectable Prague-based research Institute. We have been suspecting him for a long time now! And there are many things to back up this conclusion: i) no one has ever seen him walking in daylight, ii) most of the time he lingers in his office behind closed shutters and windows and when one is invited to meet him, he receives his guest in a dark 19th century room with frescoes ceiling dimly let by one lamp (which proves he has a style – so common for vampires (remember Lestat, Edward Cullen or Bill Compton)), iii) he looks pretty sinister, iv) he always looks pale and never wears a tan, even though he claims he goes on vacations sometimes, v) he is often away (allegedly on business trips, but we know better – he probably goes out hunting or attends vampires councils :)).

Look around you! If you work at economics, mathematics, physics or other department, there might be similar sinister-looking individuals among you. They always stay in the shadow, they linger behind the closed doors of their offices and never expose their pale bodies to the sun. Think about how many colleagues are there whom you never met during the day. You always see them there when you are about to leave and they are there, in their offices, pretending to work, wanting to chat, inviting you to come in and talk to them. Be careful! We know better and advise you to stay away from those suspicious individuals – you might be turned into one of them!

Vampires do exist!

Halloween is alsmost there and people involuntarily start to think about all these strange and spooky things media and popular culture taught us to belive it. And not just to believe but to think they are associated with Halloween (forget trick-or-treating, you will be watching horror movies again or will go to a costume party).

We, economists, are also subjected to the influce of popular culture. Ghosts, zombies, vampires - sometimes we try to use our creative minds to explore these things too. So, it might not be a big surprise for all of you that we discovered that (under some assumptions) vampires might exists (yes, they are here - maybe it is your strange neighbor or this shop attendant at the local gas station you have never seen at sunlight).

Well, if you are interested in our findings (and want to have a solid proof that vampires DO REALLY EXIST) follow the findings we will present in our blog.

We are going to present a new approach to modeling intertemporal interactions between vampires and humans based on several types of vampire behavior described in popular fiction literature, comic books, films and TV series. The main question we will try to answer would be: If vampires were real and lived amongst us, would their existence be possible? We will draw several scenarios of vampire-human co-existence and use models with differential equations to test whether vampires could have existed amongst us today and under what provisions. Although mathematical modeling usually enables researchers to reject most of the popular scenarios embedded in popular literature and films, you will be surprised to find out that it appears that several popular culture sources outline the models describing plausible and peaceful vampire and human co-existence.

So, who are the winners? Who described the co-existence of humans and vampires in the most accurate way (at least according to science)? What is your guess? The options are listed here:

a) Bram Stoker
b) Stephen King
c) Stephanie Meyer
d) Charlaine Harris

Do you want to know the right answer? Follow our blog and you will learn this (and more) and become a true expert on vampires!

Yours,

Wadim Strielkowski and Evgeny Lisin