I recently wrote the third post in a slowly evolving series of extremely nerdy blog entries for the Wild Cards website. Over the course of these posts, spread years apart, I’ve been very slowly deriving a sequence of toy models, based on physics and applied math, to explain the behavior of the fictional Wild Card virus (aka xenovirus Takis-A).
In the latest one, I boil it all down to a problem in Lagrangian mechanics. Which, I suppose, is a bit like using an H-bomb to swat a fly. I won’t lie, though. I’m pretty proud of how far I’ve taken this stupid, time-wasting idea.
But, hey, at least the plots are pretty.