But what if you don't have antivenom immediately available? Let's set the scene:
You and your friends are camping somewhere in the jungles of Indonesia, where cobras are quite common (well, more common than in the United States, at any rate). Suddenly, your friend, Jim, screams, "I'm bit! Oh, the humanity!", and you find yourself rushing to his aid. You see a cobra slithering off into the underbrush, so you know he's not pulling your leg.
Creepy, eh? Anyways, if you happen to have some antivenom with you, then you can inject it immediately, in which case you'll get the plot from the previous page. Here, we're talking about the case where you don't have antivenom with you. Again, we use Polymath, but we have to take a few extra steps to get the results we want.
The following plot combines several of our models, with antivenom being initially administered to our friend, Jim, at 5 minute intervals.
As you can see, Jim would probably be fine, as long as we could get him some antivenom within about 27.5 minutes. After that, he could be in some serious trouble.
Well, that's all we have for our exploration of the base case. Remember, this is an open-ended problem, so there are many aspects of snake bites that we've purposely left unexplored. (What effect does the victim's body size have on our model of a snake bite, etc.) Let your imagination be your guide, and explore the cobra problem on your own!
