Something I submit to my chem teacher to prove I understood constants.

How to avoid getting mugged, using the new constant.


You’re walking down the street with your brand new $3000 solid gold scientific calculator and you can’t help but take it out of your pocket every 5 seconds. So you take out your calculator to admire it some more but oh no. A hooded mugger approaches you with a bottle of chloroform and tells you the following. “I need to buy some drugs and I need a calculator to find out how much I have to pay. If you don’t give me that calculator, I’ll chloroform you, kill you, and steal it anyway.”

Finding yourself in a bit of a pickle you tuck the calculator into your pocket and freeze time with your nifty wrist-watch to assess the situation. You ponder for what would have been a minute if time hadn’t frozen and remember reading about chloroform in the newspaper yesterday. Yes, it was an article about the recent chloroform muggings, and it stated that if you were being mugged to remember the following…
In order to be mugged with chloroform you must ingest a total of 6.022 x 10^23 molecules, exactly one mole of it when it’s in gas form to be rendered unconscious.

Now you know that the amount of space inside your lungs is equal to 4.48 liters, and you know that Avagadro’s gas law constant is equal to 22.4 Liters per mol… So what you need to find out is how many seconds you have before you drop and get your ass killed. If you’re averaging about 1 breath per second, that would mean that you could divide your maximum liters by your average liters over breaths to convert your equation into seconds.

As soon as you’re able to know how much time you’ll have, you’ll take the appropriate steps to fending off your mugger. Be it a scream, a punch to the face, or a sprint in the opposite direction. So you unfreeze time and the mugger bursts back into action, you watch him unscrew the chloroform lid and pull his bandana over his mouth, he draws two or three safe breaths and angrily says the following. “What’s it going to be man?” You take a breath and take out your calculator to…

As you ascend to heaven you realize that you don’t need the calculator anymore, you have the answer now anyway, in fact you knew it all along and didn’t realize it. Oh well, you’re dead anyway.

Just out of curiosity, how many seconds has it been?