Science Can Kill

text:    Tabitha Esther

art:      Mike Force

You are FUCKED.

You thought you could get away with turning off the road. You saw the line of cars and thought, I’m never gonna get out of this city in time! You followed your knee-jerk reaction and turned your four-wheel drive Subaru into the dense Vermont woods. How bad could it be? you thought. It’s just a little off-roading. But oh! How those rugged commercials have steered you wrong, my friend! And now you’re stuck. 

You and your Subaru are ankle deep in putrid mud. But you are not alone.

The car radio is still on. “Fires…ssrrrcccccc….Carnage….shhrrrr…..No Way Out…..bbzzzzz…..No Military….No help……For the love of God..chhchhkkkk…..Save US……..BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”. You shut off the radio. You know everything anyone else does. The remote testing facility, the payoffs, the bribery, the serum, the victims, the vaccinations, the panicked news reports. And then there are the Dead, of course. The horrific Dead. How did the scientists manage this? Who let them get away with this and why? Theories abound, the most prominent being that the government hired scientists to reanimate the deceased so that they could serve in the multitude of wars they’ve instigated in the Middle East. What a great idea! The Dead ask no questions! They have no moral fiber because they can’t, they’re dead! But instead of a glorious army of zombies marching the US of A to victory, they have unleashed hordes of unstoppable eating machines. Machines that only want one thing: human brains. And your big, delicious brain is on the menu.

Survival is all that matters to you now. Unfortunately for you, this car-in-the-mud situation is whittling away your chances of doing just that. How are you going to save yourself? Who can help you get this car out of that mud with enough time to escape the masses of vicious, rotten corpses that are no doubt lingering in the wilderness?

Science will save you.

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All you need is a piece of rope and a quick trigonometry refresher. Remember Sine and Cosine? In a right triangle, the sine of an angle is the length of the side OPPOSITE that angle divided by the HYPOTENUSE of the triangle. Cosine is the length of the side ADJACENT to that angle divided by the HYPOTENUSE of the triangle.


Let’s look at the setup in birds eye view:

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You tie one end of your rope to the car and the other to a tree. By pushing at the center of the rope, you create a triangle with the left and right corners at an angle A. Let A = 5º. Solve for the total force exerted on the car and you will find out if you can push the rope hard enough to get out of the mud.

In the X direction you’ve got F1 workin’ against F2. Multiply both of these guys by cosine of A to get out the X component of the force.

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F_TOTAL is gonna be the total force pulling on your stuck-ass car and this is what we want to know before you become Zombie kibble.

Now we’ll look at the forces in the Y direction. We’ve got the force of you pushing on the rope which we’ll call FP working against F₁ and F₂. This time multiply F₁ and F₂ by the sine of A to get at the Y component of the force.

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Mmmmmrrraaaaaaaa! You hear those gooey bastards closing in. Quick! Don’t waste any time! Solve for F_TOTAL as if your life depends on it! Becuase it does!

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With this setup, you are over five times stronger than you would be pushing on the car with your bare hands! You hear a rustling in the bushes. You push the shit outta that rope! Your car budges, then lurches, then frees itself from the soggy pit it was trapped in. Yes! You jump in and start it up just as you see a herd of the undead shuffling towards you, moaning and screaming “Brraaaaaaaains!” You fire off a couple of rounds, taking out the legs of a former Highway Patrolman and dispatching another who looked like vaguely like DNC Chairman Howard Dean. No time to ponder, drive dammit! You bump through the forest and finally end up on a long clear stretch of road headed towards Canada.

Science has saved your ass once again. You can thank it later.


Want to learn more Science? Go to www.getyourscienceon.com and learn yo’self.

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