Work In Progress

It occurred to me recently why the "semantic web" (basically a computer-readable meaning-encoding scheme so that people could indicate to the computer what the english that they wrote was about and the computer could then facilitate intelligent searching) is inherently doomed to failure: to be really useful, one would have to encode as much information in the semantic web markup as one did in the english — i.e. after writing the document in English, one would then have to go and translate it into semantic web markup. Translating is often nearly as difficult as composition.

Thus any attempt at the semantic web (where the computer-readable semantics are created by humans) will fail either because it's hard enough for most people to write something once — writing literally everything twice is just way too much work. I believe that this is an inherent flaw in semantic management — the correct solution, in any form, has too high a minimum amount of work.

I suspect, too, that it's a pretty steep drop-off from there; if the computer doesn't actually understand what's being said, the usefulness probably plumets. This means that it's likely that text searches like what google provides will probably be the best which is achievable without artifical intelligence (in the sense of something which can understand abstract concepts and abstract relationships).

(Of course, if we ever invent an artifical intelligence, it's hard to imagine why it won't get as bored with being a search engine as human beings would be, but that's a different topic entirely.)

Zombie movies can generally be divided into two categories: those in which zombies are magic (typically evil spirits inhabiting recent corpses), and those in which zombies are psuedo-scientific (typically a virus). Of the first type of zombie, there's little to quarrel with because magic can do anything, and that's quite fine.

The pseudo-scientific explanations have always bothered me, though, because they're so implausible. They're not implausible because zombies don't actually exist — neither to six-legged horses, but those are perfectly plausible ‐ it's that virus-zombies are utterly unlike anything biological machinery has yet produced, and for fairly good reason.

The main problem with a v-zombie is energy. Specifically, walking around, smashing down doors, and eating people all take energy. But zombies don't have any of the machinery necessary for converting large amounts of chemical energy into kinetic energy. They don't breathe, so they're limited to being anerobic, and they don't have a working circulatory system so they can't transport energy from the places the living body had stored it to where it's actually being used. Now, a lack of a working circulatory system has some definite advantages — in particular since zombies are rotting, and rotting is achieved by some pretty nasty bacteria producing some pretty nasty toxins, the zombies don't circulate those toxins around. (Some might object that the zombies are already dead and so toxins can't kill them, but the reason that toxins are toxic is that they interfere with important stuff, e.g. nerve firing, muscle contraction, etc. and even if they're dead zombies do rely on the nervous system and the muscles of the body they're inhabiting.)

Anyhow, the biggest problem, as far as realism goes, is that zombies have no way of actually producing the energy which they use — especially when they last for months or years. Basically, all of that machinery (heart, lungs, circulatory system, etc) which zombies don't use (and hence doesn't matter if it gets shot up) are actually necessary for a human to walk around. If it wasn't, living people wouldn't have them.

The only solution which I can think of is to make zombies more temporary — muscle, etc. can be digested and used for energy, so the way out, I think, is for zombies to be digesting their own bodies for energy. This would make energy production highly localized, and consequently make zombies mostly immune to poison, gun fire, etc. as they traditionally are, but it would make them a lot less permanent. I would imagine that they'd probably last 12-24 hours (of constant activity, more of they go dormant). This would actually make them a lot more exciting, I think — in most zombie movies the goal is to wait out some period of time, often when people with lots of guns arrive. Instead of requiring a deus-ex-machina for the ending, 24 hour zombies would give a natural ending — you just need to survive until 24 hours since the last zombie was made. This would work out quite well, dramatically, as it would make the zombie infestation something that would actually be survivable (one of the main problems with a lot of zombie movies is that the ending is unsatisfying because while the heroes have survived the movie, surviving afterwards just isn't plausible).

Zombies would still, of course, have the urge to try to eat people. This could be achieved in two ways:

1. Zombies retain the basic instincts, eating among the

2. the virus which infects them gives them the urge to eat things

3. the virus which infects them gives them the urge to bite people to transmist said disease

Of course, I still think that the evil spirit approach works better (since it circumvents limitations like those above), but I could respect a virus-zombie like this, and I think that it would work out quite well, dramatically.