I was reminded by a friend of the scene in the Princess Bride where the Dread Pirate Robers (aka Wesley) fools Vizzini into poisoning himself in a game of wits because he had built up an immunity to iocane powder, a powerful poison. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go watch the movie. It’s a classic.

He's about to drink a mug full of iocane powser. Inconceivable! Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Then I thought “Man, it would be sweet to just build up immunities to all sorts of poisons, thereby making yourself nearly invincible to poisoning”. However, this idea is completely reliant on this being real. Oops.

After googling, I came across a term: Mithridatism. So it is real! Sweet! It’s defined in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as “tolerance to a poison acquired by taking gradually increased doses of it”. It’s named after the King of Pontus from 120-63 BC: Mithridatis VI. He tried to commit suicide using poison during a revolt, but had to be stabbed by his bodyguard instead because of his immunity to poison. He had built it up to thwart assassination attempts, and it was apparently pretty successful. (note: this is likely true, but could be exaggerated by legend)

Snake handlers also use this technique to become resistant or even immune to snake bites, and alcoholics become more immune to the effects of alcohol over time.

I’m not sure how someone would go about becoming immune, but I guess one would find out the lethal dose and then take about 1/10th of that every day for several months, observing the effects very carefully. Then, one would keep adding more and more poison.

It would be helpful to find out how quickly the liver gets rid of a specific poison so that if it takes more than a day, the subject is not saturating their body with toxins. For instance, on average the liver metabolizes 1 oz of 80 proof alcohol every hour. Everyone is different, but that’s about average. If you keep taking more than 1 oz of alcohol every hour, you’re going to get drunk and probably get alcohol poisoning if you don’t stop at some point.

So, let’s say, if it takes the body 36 hours to completely metabolize a certain amount of arsenic, taking that amount each day would eventually build up in the body until it reached a lethal dose. So the person would have to make sure to take it very slowly and stop at the first sign of illness.

WARNING: I do not actually plan on doing this and NEITHER SHOULD YOU. DO NOT TAKE POISON. Talk to your doctor or royal advisor if you are the ruler of a country and are worried about being assassinated. Just sayin’.

This clock would be one full day. Nice!

I was hanging out with a buddy of mine recently. We were getting lunch and ended up talking about everything: God, college, food, American culture, you name it.

We eventually got to talking about how we wished we were on the metric system. It makes everything so much easier! It would be sweet to be able to use easier math instead of using meters, grams, and liters. With the U.S. custom system there are weird measurements like:

5,280 feet = 1760 yards = 880 fathoms = 1 mile

7000 grains = 256 drams = 16 oz = 1 lb

231 cubic inches = 8 pints= 4 quarts = 1 gallon.

As we were talking excitedly about this, he eventually threw off the conversation by saying “We should be on Metric TIME too!” At this point I responded with confusion and he started explaining the intricacies of Metric Time. “Uhh…..what?” was my response for most of the conversation.

While the timekeeping method is standard throughout the world (as far as I know), metric time is a proposed revamping of our system of time units. I thought he was just making up to mess with me. But NO! There’s actually a system of Metric Time.

.                                                 Standard                                Metric

Seconds/minute                          60                                         100

Minutes/hour                              60                                         100

Hours/day                                    24                                         10

Now if this were going to be adopted, there would be 100,000 Metric seconds in one day (instead of 86,400 standard/ephemeris seconds), so the Metric second would be a little bit shorter (1 metric second = 0.864 standard seconds).

Also, the metric prefix multiples (hecto-, kilo-, mega-, giga-, etc) can be used to give the base units new meaning. So a kilosecond (1000 metric second) would equal 10 minutes. A kilominute would be 1 day and a megaminute would be 1000 days (about 2.7 years). So instead of saying “a fortnight (14 days)” we might say a megasecond (10 days).

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Curiosity: Navigation in Space

I was watching Apollo 13 (Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton) for the 20th time recently. It’s an amazing story of triumph in the face of crippling catastrophe.

However, one scene in particular piqued my curiosity. The Command Module’s oxygen tanks had just blown up and the inertia from the venting gas is throwing the ship around in circles. In Houston at Mission Control, the Guidance, Navigation, and Controls Systems Engineer (GNC) says to the Flight Director, “They’re all over the place. They keep going close to gimbal lock”.

The word “gimbal” comes up a few more times in the film, often as a central conflict between crew members (“I’m going to need your gimbal angles, Jack! Before you shut down the computer!” -Lovell).  It also gets a few close-ups on camera. If you don’t know what it is, it looks like this:

It floats around in the scene

As I wondered why this was so important, I assumed it was how they navigated. Then I thought, “How do astronauts navigate in space?! It’s not like they have a compass. How do gimbals work?”

So here I am.

After Googling “How to navigate in space” and stumbling through some inconclusive links and blogs, I eventually came across what I was looking for: A wiki article explaining a “Inertial navigation system” and how it works.

It works based off of the technique of dead reckoning. After getting an initial position, orientation, and velocity (speed AND direction), a computer uses motion sensors (accelerometers) and rotation sensors (gyroscopes) to measure the position, velocity, and orientation of the vehicle continuously. It’s kinda like if you were to blindfold someone and lead them around, they would be able to tell how far they walked and maybe where they were in relation to where they started; only, these instruments are WAY more accurate.

Here a pilot takes his speed (10 knots) and direction to predict his location at 9:30 and 10:00. Smooth.Via Wiki.

This gyroscope is the “gimbal” that they are referring to in the film, which helps them figure out which direction they are pointing. The “gimbal lock” they are referring to is when 1 of the 3 axis of the gyroscope is restricted from moving (because your ship is spinning around so much?), so (I think) it can’t give any data in 1 axis. Which is a problem if you need it to know where you are.

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