My girlfriend, like so many of the really smart people I know, is something of an insomniac. It’s understood between us that she is free to use my computer, watch my TV, eat out of my kitchen, read my books, and generally make herself at home during her sleepless small hours at my condominium. Often I find endearing bits of evidence of her vigils during the daylight hours–a DVD left in the player, a book out of place, an empty cracker box in the kitchen trash. Last week I woke up one morning and found that she’d left Google Earth open on my desktop. The search queue immediately caught my attention, as the top three entries were “Auschwitz,” “Buchenwald,” and “Dachau.” I had to ask her about this later.
“Why,” I put to her, “were you looking at satellite pictures of concentration camps in the middle of the night?”
“Oh,” she replied, with complete nonchalance. “I wanted to see what they looked like from God’s point of view.”

It was suggested on halfbakery.com that a pill could be created that would generate a comfortable heat in a person’s gut. These are my thoughts on the subject.

The first problem is going to be finding a reaction that is sufficiently exothermic that the amount of stuff we can pack into a pill will give off the necessary heat. Obviously, the reaction should have no toxic or gaseous products. We might call this the “thermodynamic” part of the problem.

To give an idea of how much heat we need, let’s adopt drinking a cup of hot tea as a model system. An 8 oz cup of hot tea at a “comfortable drinking temperature” of 65C contains 8 oz = 237 mL of water at 65 C – 37 C = 28 C above body temperature. The heat required to elevate 237 mL of water by 28 C is (237mL)(28C)(1 cal/CmL) = 6636 calories, or about 7 Kcal.

Dry calcium chloride (CaCl2) gives off about 18 Kcal/mol when dissolved in water. Dividing the required heat by the heat of solution of CaCl2 gives us (7 Kcal)/(18 Kcal/mol) = 0.39 moles of CaCl2 that we must dissolve to give off 7 Kcal. Unfortunately, the molar mass of CaCl2 is 111 g/mol, so 0.39 moles of it weighs 43 grams! With a density for CaCl2 of 2.15 g/mL, we’re left with 20 mL of dry salt that we must consume. Even though the solution products are the harmless and physiologically ubiquitous ions Ca2+ and Cl-, the consumption of this much salt is bound to produce a strongly hypertonic solution in the gut, which will almost certainly cause dehydration and diahhrea.

A better candidate is calcium oxide (CaO), also known as quicklime. Although the hydration of calcium oxide is slightly less exothermic than that of calcium chloride at 15.5 Kcal/mol, it also has a significantly lower molar mass of 55 g/mol, meaning we can pack more reactivity into the same mass. It has higher density, too. What’s more, besides heat, hydration of calcium oxide produces calcium hydroxide (CaOH2), a medium-strong base that will react exothermically with bile acid (HCl) to give off even more heat, water, and *hydrolyzed* calcium chloride (i.e. we’re not going to get any more heat out of CaCl2 at this point).

Assuming that the biggest horse-pill we can swallow is 3 mL, multiplying by CaO’s density of 3.35 g/mL gives us about 10g of CaO that we can reasonably ingest in a single pill. 10g CaO is 0.18 moles, so the hydration step alone should produce (0.18 moles)(15.5 Kcal/mol) = 2.8 Kcal. What’s more, each mole of Ca(OH)2 is 2-normal in hydroxide, so we end up with 0.36 moles of base. Acid neutralization of hydroxide liberates 13.7 Kcal/mol as a rule, so we can expect an additional (0.36 mol)(13.7 Kcal/mol) = 4.9 Kcal from the acid-base chemistry. Summing contributions from hydration and neutralization of CaO gives us 2.8 Kcal + 4.9 Kcal = 7.7 Kcal given off by our 10g quicklime pill. From a strictly thermodynamic point of view, we could actually afford to make our horse-pill a bit smaller. Incidentally, the hydration of quicklime is, I believe, the same reaction that is used to heat MREs.

So it looks like we’ve solved the first part of the problem. We’ve found a reaction with the necessary energy density that is without toxic or gaseous byproducts. We’re still basically eating a salt pill and have to contend with the expected consequences of that, but we haven’t produced any particular substance that’s going to poison us. The problem now is one of kinetics, i.e. it has to do with how fast things happen. The hydration and neutralization of quicklime in the stomach are going to happen lickety-split fast, and so we’re essentially going to get all 7 Kcal dumped into the gut over the course of a few seconds. This will probably produce sufficient local heating to generate steam. What we need is a sustained release (SR) formulation for our pill that will prevent all of it from reacting at once.

More insight can be had from our model system. Although I’ve never tried it myself, my guess is that, while 65C may be a comfortable “sipping” temperature for hot tea, a person who took a whole cup at that temperature and slammed it down his or her throat all at once, which is approximately the same effect our pill would have, wouldn’t be very happy or very comfortable. This, of course, is not how people drink hot beverages. It takes minutes to drink a cup of hot tea, during which time it probably cools considerably. To get a realistic idea of how much heat we actually absorb from a cup of hot tea, and how long it takes us to do it, it would be necessary to measure the temperature time-course of a real cup of tea as it is being consumed and integrate to get the area under the curve. This would not be a difficult experiment. Once we knew the absolute heat absorbed from a real hot beverage, we could adjust the absolute energy goal for our pill accordingly. More importantly, once we knew how long it takes to comfortably drink that beverage, we’d know the time-course over which our pill was expected to give off its energy. This information, in turn, would determine the composition of our SR formulation.

SR formulation entails a slowly-dissolving matrix which releases the active ingredient into the gut at a measured rate. This matrix, unfortunately, is going to add mass and volume to an already ungainly pill. Because we don’t need a particularly long-lasting SR formulation, however, it’s probably possible to keep the volume gain as low as 100%, i.e. we can probably safely assume that SR formulation will no more than double the volume of the pill. If we then half our target heat, so that one pill equals about half-a-cup of tea, we’ve both solved the pill-size problem and provided a more versatile dosing system: One pill for light warmth, two for full strength, and three for extra strength.

This is an interesting inquiry both because it is fairly easy to model and because it suggests a couple of simple experiments. The first, mentioned above, involves measuring the real heat absorbed by a real body from a real cup of hot tea, and the second, readily implied, is to pack 10g of quicklime into one or more gelcaps, dump them in an unstirred container of 0.1N HCl, and see what happens to the temperature and other observables.

Several years ago I designed a couple of chess sets, and among the feedback I received there was an e-mail from a gentleman named Ray, who also made chess sets and had, in fact, won some awards for his “themed” chess sets, which included a set made from various makes and sizes of fire hydrants. Ray was an interesting guy; during the course of our correspondence, I learned that he was about 50, that he lived with or near his mother, and that he’d served in Vietnam. He was single, and one of the last times I heard from him he’d taken off around the world to meet a Russian mail-order bride he’d been conversing with via e-mail. He got as far as Paris, as I recall, before chickening out. He sent a long group e-mail to myself and others of his friends describing the journey in lavish and sometimes eccentric detail. As an example of the latter, I recall a confrontation he described between himself and an airline employee at the Denver airport in which he was told that his “pants were not suitable for flying.” His e-mail did not include a description of the pants in question, leaving the nature of their unsuitability for us to imagine. The incident is described in passing, as Ray’s experience of the Denver airport was simply in passing, but I found the phrase evocative and it has since become one of my favorite idioms: “His pants are not suitable for flying” has, in my mind, approximately the same meaning as “his elevator does not go all the way to the top” and “he’s one card short of a full deck.” I say “approximately” because, while the latter expressions clearly imply lunacy characteried by deficiency, of one sort or another, “his pants are not suitable for flying” seems to lack this perjorative connotation. One whose pants are not suitable for flying is crazy in an entirely benign way; as long as there are responsible personnel to remind him to change them before boarding an aircraft, no harm can come of him.

I knew I liked Dr. M_______ the second week I was in the Chemistry department. I was riding the elevator up from the basement. It stopped at the ground floor and a college-age male with some kind of neurodegenerative disease rolled onto the elevator in his wheelchair, together with a woman who was obviously there to assist him. The doors closed, and at the next floor Dr. M_______ got on. The kid in the wheelchair was parked right in front of the buttons. Without missing a beat, and with a slightly impatient tone, Dr. M_______ says “Five, please.” “Sure,” the kid replies amiably, and reaches out a trembling, scrawny arm and, with some difficulty, presses the button for five. Nobody said anything for the rest of the ride up, but you could feel both the kid and his assistant, who might’ve been a sister, flush with gratitude. Most people, in that situation, they look at the kid and feel like they can’t ask anything of him, so maybe they nod politely and smile awkwardly while they reach around him to press the button for themselves. Dr. M_______ saw, in the second between the time the elevator doors opened and the time he stepped on, how rarely this kid would find himself in a situation–ANY situation–in which HE could be the one helping out, instead of the one asking for help. He saw an opportunity to make the kid feel like a normal person, and he took it, without being patronizing, without trying to politely tippy-toe around the glaring fact of the kid’s handicap, and without second-guessing himself. He saw all that, and he did it, and he never once let on that he knew what he was doing. But he did, and everybody on that elevator knew he did, and every one of us, including me, had a brief glimpse of authentic human kindness. From that moment on I knew he was someone I wanted to know better.

Recorded in 1959 and released as the B-side of “Back in the USA,” Chuck Berry’s song “Memphis, Tennessee” was not an immediate hit in the US, but would creep as high as #6 on the British pop charts in 1960(?). Although diametrically opposed in tone, the song’s story foreshadows Berry’s 1965 hit “Promised Land” (covered by Elvis in 1973) with its protagonist negotiating a cross-country long-distance phone call with the operator. In “Promised Land,” the narrator’s tone is jubilant and triumphant, but in “Memphis, Tennessee” it is somber and morose. “Memphis” is the story of a young man returning a long-distance call to a girl named “Marie,” who lives in Memphis, “on the south side/high up on a ridge/just a half-a-mile from the Mississippi bridge,” with whom the narrator had been emotionally involved, and subsequently separated “because her Mom did not agree.” The songs plays with listeners’ expectations; based on the typical content of pop songs from that era, most people automatically assume that the narrator is a young man, just starting out in the world, who remembers Marie as an early sweetheart, perhaps from his teenage years, with whom he was forced to part because of her mother’s disapproval. The last line of the song, however, turns our expectations on their heads:

“Marie is only six years old. Information, please: try to put me through to her in Memphis, Tennessee.”

The song so effectively misleads us that this line commonly horrifies first-time listeners–he was involved with a six-year-old girl? On repeated listening, however, we realize that the idea of a romantic or sexual involvement between the narrator and Marie is never stated, and come to understand that Marie is not the narrator’s former sweetheart, but his child. The “Mom” mentioned in the lyrics is not a tyrannical mother-in-law figure, but the narrator’s ex-wife, who “tore apart our happy home in Memphis, Tennessee” not by meddling, but by divorcing the narrator and maintaining custody of their daughter, Marie. And so in one line the song gains a tremendous gravity, transmogrifying from an adolescent paen to puppy love (which is what most other pop songs of the era actually were) into a much more serious lament of a much more mature situation. A young man (and he must be young, for how else could his sweetheart’s *mother* effectively exert control over their relationship?) who loses a sweetheart is consolable–he has a long life ahead of him and should be able to find another. An older man who has missed the formative early years of his daughter’s life due to an acrimonious divorce is not so quick to find solace, and his is a situation that most grown men, regardless of age, could at least relate to (if not actually identify with.)

Coming as it did in 1959, this one key line in this one particular song anticipated, in its affect, the metamorphosis of Rock ‘n’ Roll itself from children’s music to adult fare, a process which would not be well underway until the advent of Cream in the late ’60s. That the song was released as a B-side and did not find widespread acceptance until covered by Lonnie Mack in 1963 is perhaps, at least in part, due to the anachronism of its theme. Rock ‘n’ Roll audiences were younger, then, and not ready for the emotional weight of a subject as serious as divorce and the pangs of fatherhood. With its incestuous blurring of the line between mother and lover, the song, of course, is ripe fodder for Freudian analysis, and especially given the pedophiliac tone of some of Berry’s other songs (e.g. “Sweet Little Sixteen”) and the sex scandals that rocked his career (“C’mon, baby, just let me pee on you!”) the way is clearly open for disappointing moralistic interpretations of “Memphis, Tennessee.” Such tawdry readings miss the more profound meanings of the song and of its position in cultural space.

It has been theorized that part of the appeal of boxing is grounded in the homoerotic tension that seems to underly so many hypermasculine behaviors: Two hypervirile men enter the ring and pound on each other until one of them literally cannot continue. Then, if it’s been a good fight (i.e. if Tyson wasn’t involved), they hug each other and cry like sobbing sisters. That’s the real pay-off, getting to show their soft sides and have them appreciated by the world without having to seem like a pair of sissies. All that’s required is that they nearly beat each other to death first.

Science has an analogous process. From the very beginnings of scientific education, the objective nature of the discipline–the non-self-ness–is emphasized to all students. The style of written science (the passive voice) is deliberately chosen to eliminate personhood, and is often explained with words to the effect of, “we don’t care WHO made the measurement, just that it was made and was such-and-so.” For this reason, scientists can be notoriously bad at giving credit where credit is due. It’s not that they’re all glory-grabbing assholes who want to steal others’ work; just that they’ve spent their adult lives steeped in a culture that doesn’t care who made the measurement, only that it was made and that it was such-and-so.

But sometimes, after a long and illustrious career that includes the luck and determination to be associated with a major discovery, an individual scientist achieves the crowning glory of a Nobel prize. At this point–and the culture of science is very clear about this–he or she is suddenly allowed to be a human being again. I have before me a commemorative article in Chemical & Engineering news (“C&E,” as it’s known in the trades), published as a cover story on the occassion of the one-year anniversary of Nobel laureate Richard Smalley’s death. Pp. 14-15 include a gray topbar spread cleverly titled “HUMAN ELEMENT” which, without excusing itself, describes Richard Smalley the person, in emotional terms. Because he spent his life negating his personhood through science, on the occasion of his apotheosis and death it is appropriate that his personhood be emphasized. This is the rational scientist community’s chance to revel in the emotions that we spend most of the rest of our time trying to supress, eliminate, and control for.

Maybe science is for man-vs-world what boxing is for man-vs-man; a kind of ultimate theatre of conflict. As in any conflict, premiums are placed on strength, willpower, and determination–on denial of the “baser” urges that lead us to sleep until noon and massage our data and and give up if the math gets too hard. It’s as if we acknowledge the certain pathological quality that one needs to achieve greatness as a scientist. We recognize it and acknowledge that it must have great personal costs, but because it is of such great value to society it is nonetheless condoned and encouraged in the young.

I got to wondering whether anyone had been bold enough to adopt .GOD for some proprietary file format. Turns out, according to the folks over at filext.com, there was once an Australian outfit called “Games on Demand” that used .godd to denote something called an “Arena Partial Downloaded Game” file, which is not so very exciting. Note that they opt for the four-letter extension with the extra terminal “D” to avoid potential blasphemy. Games on Demand is apparently no more, so maybe they paid the price anyway. The last few lines of Revelation tend to suggest that the Almighty is pretty touchy about his IP.

Which got me thinking about other provocative three-letter homonyms that might make amusing file extensions. SEX, for instance, has more than one usage: Alpha Software uses it to denote something called an “Alpha five set index,” and there’s at least one report that some Urban Chaos game files use the carnal extension.

.EAT, interestingly, appears to be unexploited. So, too, .DUG, .LOW, and .YAK. It’s kind of an amusing game to brainstorm applications that might use such extensions…