Michael Stastny at Mahalanobis reviews the literature on dynamic predator-prey models of vampire-human interaction: Representative Vampires (Michael Stastny, Oct. 24):
As a predator-prey scenario, we can model the dynamics of the population using some differential equations. The problem for the vampires is to set a bloodsucking rate (humans per vampire) so as to maximize a utility function subject to the dynamics. However, the model has to be made more sophisticated to account for the cyclical bloodsucking patterns found in real vampires...
Stastny notes a literature pointing to additional applications of the model in political economy.
At the University of Florida: Vampires a Mathematical Impossibility, Scientist Says (based on an alternative predator-prey model).
Joel, at Far Outliers, has been running a series of posts inspired by the original Count Dracula:
- The Real Dracula's Contemporaries
- San Juan Capistrano, Defender of Belgrade, 1456
- Dracula vs. the Transylvanian Germans
- A Vlach, Impaled
He [Dracula] took as many captives as he could find and impaled them "lengthwise and crosswise," according to Beheim's narrative. Their bodies were strung on Tîmpa Hill above the chapel. Dracula meanwhile was seated at a table having his meal; he seemed to enjoy the gruesome scenario of his butchers cutting off the limbs of many of his victims. Beheim tells us the additional detail that the prince "dipped his bread in the blood of the victims," since "watching human blood flow gave him courage." The stage was thus set for Dracula's later reputation as a blood drinker or vampire, and his subsequent fictional reincarnation as Count Dracula. As we will see, this episode at Tîmpa Hill did more to damage Dracula's reputation than any other act in his whole career. (From Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times, by Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally (Back Bay, 1989), pp. 120, 123-124)
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