"Look Inside" - April, 3, 2020

[Beth Tyrpin]

I got on the wrong train. It took awhile, but I made it. What a great meta. One of my favorite kinds with a satisfying answer. I found this much harder than last week.

[Laura M]

Didn't get to it until last night, and then I couldn't figure out the meta for anything. When I looked again this afternoon, it just clicked. Great one, on shore!

[spotter]

Finally on shore! Phew! I thought I'd be stuck on the boat this week.

[tim1217]

Have gone down lots of rabbit holes and even have had some help with Y/N questions, but alas I am still very much LAS.

So in the meantime, here's the Friday night musical interlude. You'll have to forgive this Liverpool football (soccer) fan, but the team's theme song is a tremendous message of hope. When Gerry and the Pacemakers released their version of this song in 1963, the owner of the club (who was a friend of Gerry's) asked if the team could adopt it as their theme, and the rest is history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV5_LQArLa0

If you liked that, and you've never seen the fans at Liverpool's Anfield stadium sing it before every match, it's well worth viewing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N51jWNsW3F8

PS: Apologies to any Manchester City or Manchester United fans!

[Geoduck]

Went very enjoyably (week 2-ish, MG-wise), after wasting much of the day (instead of doing the puzzle) working with four separate heating firms to diagnose a broken furnace. I'll celebrate this fun meta sitting in front of the . . . oh, yeah, we're out of firewood, too.

As a Californian, I need to know: approximately how many Manhattan cocktails does your body require to prevent freezing solid with extended exposure to temps in the 50s?

RE: your question: the absolute number of cocktails does not matter. One simply must maintain a constant level integrated over the desired time span of about one drink in the system. (One drink, in this case = 1 Manhattan made with standard beverages.) (For fellow geeks among Muggles, alcohol metabolism is steady-state, aka. zeroth order.) Bottom line. Have a Manhattan. An hour or so later, have another. Repeat. Enjoy. Stay warm. Wash your hands and don't touch your face. Remember Winston Churchill: "I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me." Cheers ....

Well be careful because zero order comes with some tricky parts.

So. Let’s say you are at 100 mg% (well buzzed and probably at the level you do not feel pain) and zero level elimination (which is about 15 +/- 4 mg% per hour in a “social drinker”) means your elimination profile would look like this:
BAC.jpg
BUT, since zero order is also saturable, if you take another drink in 1 hour and then another in another hour (all highly reasonable!) you could hit an asymptotic rise in blood alcohol.
Asym.jpg

Then zero order is NOT your friend because you don’t get back to the approx. 17 mg% until first you crunch through all the excess alcohol. The simplest example of this is the “day after” a particularly hard party (that wine taste with your friends, that football homecoming) even after you have slept 7 hours or so and you are STILL buzzed. I believe at that point you have made an Asymptote out of yourself.

But Natalie suggested one drink per hour, and given the zero-order kinetics (other than at the very lowest concentrations of alcohol), for the typical drinker the rate of removal is, indeed, close to the amount of alcohol in one average drink per hour. So Natalie's one-drink-per-hour recommendation would look more like a sawtooth if graphed, but the blood alcohol level would not rise over the long haul.

However, individuals vary greatly in the rate of elimination; those with very slow rates of alcohol metabolism might experience a rise (but with a sawtooth imposed on the rise) as in your second graph.

We experienced drinkers, on the other hand, have a higher rate of alcohol metabolism, so we might need a drink every 45 minutes, or 40 minutes, or 30 minutes, or...

[Beth C]

Done and done on Friday evening! I think both the grid and the meta were a little harder than usual. Where's my vino? Good luck Muggles.

[boharr]

RE: your question: the absolute number of cocktails does not matter. One simply must maintain a constant level integrated over the desired time span of about one drink in the system. (One drink, in this case = 1 Manhattan made with standard beverages.) (For fellow geeks among Muggles, alcohol metabolism is steady-state, aka. zeroth order.) Bottom line. Have a Manhattan. An hour or so later, have another. Repeat. Enjoy. Stay warm. Wash your hands and don't touch your face. Remember Winston Churchill: "I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me." Cheers ....

Well be careful because zero order comes with some tricky parts.

So. Let’s say you are at 100 mg% (well buzzed and probably at the level you do not feel pain) and zero level elimination (which is about 15 +/- 4 mg% per hour in a “social drinker”) means your elimination profile would look like this:
BAC.jpg
BUT, since zero order is also saturable, if you take another drink in 1 hour and then another in another hour (all highly reasonable!) you could hit an asymptotic rise in blood alcohol.
Asym.jpg

Then zero order is NOT your friend because you don’t get back to the approx. 17 mg% until first you crunch through all the excess alcohol. The simplest example of this is the “day after” a particularly hard party (that wine taste with your friends, that football homecoming) even after you have slept 7 hours or so and you are STILL buzzed. I believe at that point you have made an Asymptote out of yourself.

But Natalie suggested one drink per hour, and given the zero-order kinetics (other than at the very lowest concentrations of alcohol), for the typical drinker the rate of removal is, indeed, close to the amount of alcohol in one average drink per hour. So Natalie's one-drink-per-hour recommendation would look more like a sawtooth if graphed, but the blood alcohol level would not rise over the long haul.

However, individuals vary greatly in the rate of elimination; those with very slow rates of alcohol metabolism might experience a rise (but with a sawtooth imposed on the rise) as in your second graph.

We experienced drinkers, on the other hand, have a higher rate of alcohol metabolism, so we might need a drink every 45 minutes, or 40 minutes, or 30 minutes, or...

Didn’t really follow all this but the last paragraph has my wholehearted support.

[CPJohnson]

Still with Isaac.....

[Natalie]

Well be careful because zero order comes with some tricky parts.

So. Let’s say you are at 100 mg% (well buzzed and probably at the level you do not feel pain) and zero level elimination (which is about 15 +/- 4 mg% per hour in a “social drinker”) means your elimination profile would look like this:
BAC.jpg
BUT, since zero order is also saturable, if you take another drink in 1 hour and then another in another hour (all highly reasonable!) you could hit an asymptotic rise in blood alcohol.
Asym.jpg

Then zero order is NOT your friend because you don’t get back to the approx. 17 mg% until first you crunch through all the excess alcohol. The simplest example of this is the “day after” a particularly hard party (that wine taste with your friends, that football homecoming) even after you have slept 7 hours or so and you are STILL buzzed. I believe at that point you have made an Asymptote out of yourself.

But Natalie suggested one drink per hour, and given the zero-order kinetics (other than at the very lowest concentrations of alcohol), for the typical drinker the rate of removal is, indeed, close to the amount of alcohol in one average drink per hour. So Natalie's one-drink-per-hour recommendation would look more like a sawtooth if graphed, but the blood alcohol level would not rise over the long haul.

However, individuals vary greatly in the rate of elimination; those with very slow rates of alcohol metabolism might experience a rise (but with a sawtooth imposed on the rise) as in your second graph.

We experienced drinkers, on the other hand, have a higher rate of alcohol metabolism, so we might need a drink every 45 minutes, or 40 minutes, or 30 minutes, or...

Didn’t really follow all this but the last paragraph has my wholehearted support.

Mine, too!

[ChrisKochmanski]

Just now digging in on WSJCC, after a family event took me away from the puzzle last night and much of today. Got the grid ... and have an idea for how to get to the meta ... but it isn't quite clicking yet. Maybe I'm in a rabbit hole. Not so bad, though -- Isaac has whipped me up a refreshing Negroni.

[TPS]

Onshore with a shove...Also Onshore in the PGWCC which (not that anyone cares) is the first time I have completed a grid without having to cheat at all AND got the meta totally on my own.

[juliet]

I'm on my way to the shore! Fun ride!

[BrianMac]

Man, did this one put up a fight. Thought I was going down for a while. Finally dragged myself to shore.

[DrTom]

RE: your question: the absolute number of cocktails does not matter. One simply must maintain a constant level integrated over the desired time span of about one drink in the system. (One drink, in this case = 1 Manhattan made with standard beverages.) (For fellow geeks among Muggles, alcohol metabolism is steady-state, aka. zeroth order.) Bottom line. Have a Manhattan. An hour or so later, have another. Repeat. Enjoy. Stay warm. Wash your hands and don't touch your face. Remember Winston Churchill: "I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me." Cheers ....

Well be careful because zero order comes with some tricky parts.

So. Let’s say you are at 100 mg% (well buzzed and probably at the level you do not feel pain) and zero level elimination (which is about 15 +/- 4 mg% per hour in a “social drinker”) means your elimination profile would look like this:
BAC.jpg
BUT, since zero order is also saturable, if you take another drink in 1 hour and then another in another hour (all highly reasonable!) you could hit an asymptotic rise in blood alcohol.
Asym.jpg

Then zero order is NOT your friend because you don’t get back to the approx. 17 mg% until first you crunch through all the excess alcohol. The simplest example of this is the “day after” a particularly hard party (that wine taste with your friends, that football homecoming) even after you have slept 7 hours or so and you are STILL buzzed. I believe at that point you have made an Asymptote out of yourself.

I would have bet a lot of money that our muggle blog would never have had graphs about alcohol level.

Well then Bob, to paraphrase the famous (and probably apocryphal) Coolidge anecdote - "You'd Lose"

[DrTom]

RE: your question: the absolute number of cocktails does not matter. One simply must maintain a constant level integrated over the desired time span of about one drink in the system. (One drink, in this case = 1 Manhattan made with standard beverages.) (For fellow geeks among Muggles, alcohol metabolism is steady-state, aka. zeroth order.) Bottom line. Have a Manhattan. An hour or so later, have another. Repeat. Enjoy. Stay warm. Wash your hands and don't touch your face. Remember Winston Churchill: "I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me." Cheers ....

Well be careful because zero order comes with some tricky parts.

So. Let’s say you are at 100 mg% (well buzzed and probably at the level you do not feel pain) and zero level elimination (which is about 15 +/- 4 mg% per hour in a “social drinker”) means your elimination profile would look like this:
BAC.jpg
BUT, since zero order is also saturable, if you take another drink in 1 hour and then another in another hour (all highly reasonable!) you could hit an asymptotic rise in blood alcohol.
Asym.jpg

Then zero order is NOT your friend because you don’t get back to the approx. 17 mg% until first you crunch through all the excess alcohol. The simplest example of this is the “day after” a particularly hard party (that wine taste with your friends, that football homecoming) even after you have slept 7 hours or so and you are STILL buzzed. I believe at that point you have made an Asymptote out of yourself.

But Natalie suggested one drink per hour, and given the zero-order kinetics (other than at the very lowest concentrations of alcohol), for the typical drinker the rate of removal is, indeed, close to the amount of alcohol in one average drink per hour. So Natalie's one-drink-per-hour recommendation would look more like a sawtooth if graphed, but the blood alcohol level would not rise over the long haul.

However, individuals vary greatly in the rate of elimination; those with very slow rates of alcohol metabolism might experience a rise (but with a sawtooth imposed on the rise) as in your second graph.

We experienced drinkers, on the other hand, have a higher rate of alcohol metabolism, so we might need a drink every 45 minutes, or 40 minutes, or 30 minutes, or...

Heck, I stopped twice during the reading of this for a cocktail (since I wasn't getting anywhere with the META yet). Perhaps a little ethanol enhanced perception will assist the task. Lord knows it was always helpful in my youth to allow me to see EXACTLY what was going on and offer crystal clear advice (for which I almost always had to apologize).

Oh and although the mental picture is appropriate, mine was never a sawtooth-like reaction, I gravitated more towards being hammered.

[DrTom]

Rats - I keep reading about how the light is coming on for all my Muggle friends and I am not even seeing a glimmer. My one big idea, unless I am implementing it incorrectly, yields a word in Klingon.

[MajordomoTom]

asymptotic

[mheberlingx100]

On shore. Tough meta. Went down a few dead ends before having my Aha Moment. Time for a celebratory beverage.

[MajordomoTom]

On the beach, sorry Isaac, no mas tequila, it's tiki time for Tom.

Seen this once before, took a gentle nudge for me to start down the correct path on this one. Agree it's a 100-percent-er.

[Nycerjohnnie]

I got more than a nudge. I was dragged out of my foundering ship and onto shore. Don’t count me among the ranks of the others on shore, I’m not worthy. I am truly impressed that anyone can get this week’s meta. You’re all much smarter than I.