I'm still aggressively pursuing my dream of achieving the perfect pop, that is, the bag of microwave popcorn that yields 100% edible product with no wasted kernels. The search for the perfect pop has been long and much harder than I thought it would be. In this attempt, you can see by my analysis that I fell well short of my goal.
Figure 1: This bag yielded a satisfying volume of edible product. As you can see from this image, the substance that resulted from heating the bag in the microwave is both enticing and copious. Will this bag be the perfect pop? When I eat to the bottom of this, will I find that there are no unpopped kernels of popcorn left over?
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Figure 2: In this establishing shot you can see that there does remain a disappointingly large number of unpopped kernels.
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Figure 3: This is a view of the bag at high magnification. The brown ovoid masses that you see prominently represent unpopped kernels of popcorn. I realize that this image is a little bit too busy to be meaningful but I present it here so that you can see the raw data that I had to work with in my analysis.
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Figure 4: This image represents the same data presented above in Figure 3, but here it has been subject to graphical analysis which has revealed several key features which would otherwise have been lost to the naked eye. This analysis shows that there were 20 kernels of unpopped popcorn left over after I ate the edible yield. The unpopped kernels displayed in this analysis are marked with red circles. The analysis also reveals the presence of something else in this image, which I found startling. This careful analysis reveals that there was, in fact, edible popcorn substance remaining in this bag even after I had given the bag up for finished. If you study the output from this analysis, you can see the edible product marked by small green circles. Comparative optical quantitative techniques show that the largest of the uneaten edible fragments is nearly as large as an unpopped popcorn kernel. Finally, the graphical analysis that I undertook also reveals the presence of a substance far more sinister and disturbing than either of the two upon which I have previously commented. Marked with blue circles, even a person unaccustomed to the analysis of popcorn kernels can see that what we have here, are half-poppers. Half-poppers are the worst. What these are, are kernels that did pop, but didn't pop all the way. These are the kernels that start to look good to you when you get to the bottom of the bag, and your show is still on, and you don't feel like getting up for something else. These are the ones that you start to believe are edible, and they'll get you every time because they aren't. They'll hurt your teeth and they don't taste good, and I would much rather have kernels that just didn't pop at all than these half-poppers. I actually think we could demoralize Al Qaeda right out of existence if we all collected our half poppers, and then we invited the terrorists over for a movie, and maybe some beer or whatever, and then when we made popcorn we slipped our half-poppers into their bags without telling them. After that, they'd go back to their caves saying, "Man, that place is a dump. Why do we even bother? Their popcorn over there sucks."
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