If we can put aside the hurt feelings and personal accusations about those who pop and the people who love/hate them for just a moment, here's something vaguely on topic that made me smile.
I love the web. It brings you to weird things like this page for a physical chemistry class at the University of Illinois.
Of special note is the page of homework helpers, where it would appear a teacher's assistant with a dark humor streak created a series of chemistry problems set in the world of the candy magnate/munitions factory owner/brutal murderer Willy Wonka and the chemistry behind his various ways to eliminate the sweet innocent children who visit his factory. (There's also a series of Hellboy problems in there, not to mention Robert Browning. That that, English department.)
They are posted in reverse chronological order, and as it happens, Violet is first and provides the setup for the series. Problem 3 on her page asks -- and answers -- the question, "Does Violet keep expanding till she’s no more or does she return to her normal size and live?"
I am not a chemist so I did not understand a word of it. However, all of them are funny and I recommend taking a few moments to poke around. He also tackles such burning scientific questions as the nitric acid content of a chocolate river and how many children Wonka does in every week.
I have a few issues with their solution to that Violet question.
The problem neglects a critical question: What's Violet's maximum capacity? They assume that she'll be alright because the first term of the volume function eventually returns to zero. But first it rises to some nonzero value. If that value exceeds Violet's maximum capacity, then she'll explode before the gas subsides. That maximum volume is determined by β (and is actually proportional to β^5), so it's by no means safe to ignore it.
I've put a lot of thought into this scenario, purely coincidentally. At one point I was working on a second NFP story where someone is exposed to an older, more unstable version of NFP that behaves in a similar fashion: The victim first inflates dramatically, then gradually deflates. Different people have different maximum capacities. A person who receives less than the critical dose will eventually deflate and be fine for the most part. Above that dose, boom.
There are a couple of other errors in their solution, but they're purely matters of math geekery and not at all relevant to inflation.
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