Since fans of this site (can I use the plural?) are used to me debunking reports of supernatural activity, you may be surprised that today's gripe is actually about a scientist's lame attempt to debunk ghost and vampire legends as portrayed by Hollywood.
Now, I'm not saying ghosts and vampires are real, I'm just saying that physicist Costas Efthimiou is a fracking bonehead who simply isn't sufficiently geeky for the task he's set himself.
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.
Is that supposed to be a gotcha question? Because it's pretty obvious that the answer is material-less. For starters, more Hollywood ghosts float or fly than walk. Ghost is an exception that's become ever more rare as special effects get cheaper. And just because some ghosts appear to walk, doesn't mean they actually are in the sense of their feet applying force to the floor. They're mimicking human activity out of habit, but they're actually "floating" with no distance between their feet and the floor. C'mon, we worked this shit out in junior high.
It gets worse.
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 Jan. 1, 1600 and shows that the human population would be down to zero by July 1602.
I'll let the expert respond to this one: "To make you a vampire they have to suck your blood. And then you have to suck their blood. It's like a whole big sucking thing. Mostly they're just gonna kill you. Why am I still talking to you?"
That goes back at least to Bram Stoker, by the way.
Also, I'm no mathemetician, but at least superficially, Efcthulu's approach looks a lot like another calculation I've seen a bit of lately.
