Category: Me, me, me

Personal blather about one of my favorite people – Me! (This should not be a common topic, actually…)

Calling on the entire internet to study for a Philosophy exam…

I’ll probably do two posts today, but only because this one is a preview and an attempt to gather opinions…

I find writing helps me think, and we’ve got a Philosophy exam day after tomorrow. We’ve got a “study sheet” with eight concepts and fourteen potential essay questions that might come up on the exam. Is anyone reading this particularly interested in any of these (some of these have been addressed in earlier posts, but here’s the whole list)?

Concepts: “valid argument”, “sound argument”, “a priori knowledge”, “a posteriori knowledge”, “epistemology”, “metaphysics”, “doctrine of recollection”, “Objective reality/formal reality”

Essay topics (in short):

  • Describing the “Socratic Method” and contrasting it with the sophist method.
  • Discuss some of the Socratic philosophical positions that might call into question the view that what is right for a person is whatever that person believes is right.
  • Discuss Socrates’ claims that evil harms the evildoer and that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, and whether or not he’s justified in these claims
  • Critically discuss Socrates’ claim (at his trial) that he could not have been knowingly and willingly corrupting the youth
  • Discuss Socrates’ arguments in the “Apology” that death is not something to be feared
  • Discuss the “Learner’s Paradox” in the “Meno” (roughly – is it possible to “learn” something without being “taught”, and if so, how can this be?)
  • What was the point of the “slave boy” portion of the “Meno” (Socrates’ attempts to demonstrate that someone who doesn’t understand Geometry can come to have knowledge of geometry without being taught.)
  • Discuss Meno’s definition of “virtue” and Socrates’ objection to it
  • Discuss the distinction (in the “Meno”) between “true knowledge” and “opinion”, and how it relates to the question of whether virtue can be taught
  • From “Euthyphro”, discuss the issues around whether or not whether something is “pious” because The Gods love it, or if The Gods love it because it is “pious”.
  • State clearly and describe Descartes’ three levels of doubt
  • Discuss Descartes’ contention in the first Meditation that he cannot know if he is not dreaming
  • Discuss The Cogito (“I think, therefore I am” and why Descrates couldn’t instead say (for example) “I walk, therefore I am”
  • Discuss: “I hear a noise, I feel heat. These things are false since I am asleep. Yet I certainly do seem to see, hear, and feel warmth. This cannot be false.” (A quote from our translation of Descartes’…)

That’s what we’ve been given to work with. What are the odds that any of that is interesting to any of you? If so, please comment (no login required, and go ahead and put a fake email address in the comment form if it bothers you – as long as it doesn’t appear to be spam I’ll post it.). Come on, you’ll be doing me a favor, and you’ll automatically sound like a genius because we’re discussing philosophy.

Followup post later today…

I’m an interdisciplinary nerd…

Oh woe! Oh woe! Last time I checked, I was dead last on the College Scholarship Blogging Competition! Now, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I may be a cynic but I’m an optimistic cynic, and therefore think that surely if I apply my full mighty nerd powers, I can figure out what’s wrong and fix it.

First, what is going wrong? I thought for a while, and came up with a few possibilities:

  • God Hates Me
  • God Loves Me And Wants Me To Win, But Doesn’t Exist And Therefore This Does Me No Good
  • The divine is not involved, but there is a conspiracy against me involving the CIA, the NSA, the BATF, The Teamsters, the Freemasons, and the World Aquaculture Society.
  • Blatant Age Discrimination by a bunch of dang whippersnappers (Git offa my lawn!)
  • Dang Yankees
  • Perhaps my young and under-promoted blog is simply still too obscure and not well enough established to have the large number of connections that older and better-promoted blogs have, and this is just a natural result of more popular blogs being able to get their “vote for me” message out to more people, who in normal human fashion will vote for the blog with which they are most familiar.

    • (Hey, I was brainstorming, so even crazy ideas like this were considered…)
    Then, finally, the problem became obvious to me:

  • It’s too much work to vote for me

It’s so obvious now! Hordes of adoring fans are coming out of the metaphorical woodwork and going to vote for me, but are becoming exhausted and collapsing before they manage to find my name, buried near the bottom of the list of 20 different blogs!

You may not realize this, but I’m back in college because I’m trying to start my life over. I may be microbial biotechnology nerd now, but in my former life, I was a professional “computer nerd for 15 years. My amazing nerd powers are therefore being applied to solve this problem (see also the update at the end of this post):

There – one click on the image (aw, look, Cornelia wants you to vote for me!), click the confirm button that pops up, and you’ve voted for me. Problem solved. When clicked and confirmed, a new window should open and you should see the current standings. If you are presented instead with an unselected voting form, it didn’t work – let me know. Now go! Go, my fellow conspirators! Click us to victory!

But seriously – I may yet come up with a way to gain enough fame quickly enough to have a shot at the prize, but right now I’m in last friggin’ place…which means I’m free! I don’t have to worry at all about “oh, gosh, if I do that will I lose the crucial vote that loses me first place?!?!?” and I can pretty much do whatever I want, within the bounds of ethics and legality, and it’ll make no difference. Therefore, I want to point something out:

Down at the bottom of this post, you’ll see that this material is made available under a Creative Commons license. Basically, as long as you’re not a commercial venture and you give me credit, you’re allowed to take and use anything you like from here, including taking and remixing the one-click-vote thing there. And, yes, this explicitly applies to my competition (Money or no money, I really can’t imagine how a scholarship competition counts as “commercial”.)

I’ll even go one step further: if any of you other finalists happen to see this and would like to use this on your own blog, let me know and I’ll send you a version tweaked to vote for you blog instead of mine. I’ll even try to help you get it inserted into your blog if you’d like. All I ask is that you mention and link to my blog somewhere in one of your posts. Obviously I’d prefer something complimentary, but if you feel the urge to write “I hear that Sean at The Big Room rapes puppies, eats babies, and has an unnatural attraction for maple trees”, what the heck, as long as there’s a link…

What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea?
UPDATE: Dangit, I swear it looked like it was working yesterday, but the ‘one-click’ (plus confirmation) thing is unexplainably just not getting the vote in, though everything else was working correctly. For the moment, I’ve reverted to having the link bring up the official vote form in a separate window…

The offer to make it available to others still stands, however, if anyone’s interested. I’ll re-revise this post if I figure out how to get it working.

Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Park

Here’s a brief interlude for my new readers. Members of my immediate family have seen this before elsewhere, but what the heck, I may as well share with you all.

Related to my recent posts about this year’s field-trip to Yellowstone National Park, I am reminded of a trip my wife and I took last year to Norris Geyser Basin in the same park.

I’ve heard of “communing with nature”, when the natural world seems to speak to you and put you at ease. Well, on this occasion it didn’t just seem to be speaking to me, and it hardly put me at ease. The conversation between me and the park went something like as follows that day. (Forgive all the scrolling, it WAS a several-hour conversation after all. If it bugs you, feel free to say so in the comments…)

Sign:No Restroom in Geyser Basin

Well, okay, I don’t smoke, I didn’t bring a bicycle, we left the dog at home. And I guess we can hold it until later. It’s a small price to pay to go out to nice, happy, peaceful trails, away from, for example, all the annoying road construction.Traffic cone, in the middle of the trailWow! Look at that! Do I spy the Fruiting Body of the rare Yellowstone Giant Orange Holewarning Mushroom?!?!?No, wait…that’s just a traffic cone over a hole in the trail! What the heck? I thought I was getting away from road construction!

Well. Maybe things will get more natural-looking once we get a chance to walk off into the wilderness. Maybe the map’ll show where we can go.

Map of Norris Geyser Basin, with Warning to Stay On Designated Trails
Ah, look at all the lovely trails. Plenty of space to roam around in.
What? I can’t leave the trails?
sign:Stay On Designated Trails

Can’t I take a mere step or two off? Just a little bit???

Sign:Stay on TrailSign:Stay On WalkYeah, yeah, whatever. What are you going to do if I don’t – have me arrested?

 

Sign:Unlawful to Leave Walkway
What kind of criminal act could possibly be involved with just leaving the silly walkway? Littering? Vandalism?
Sign:It is UNLAWFUL and UNSAFE to: Leave the walkway in thermal areas or throw objects into or deface thermal features

Oh, come on! Look, there’s a beautiful green pool over there, full of no doubt fascinating little animalcules. Can’t I just go over and take a little look?

Sign:Keep Off - Thermal Area
“Thermal Area”? What the heck is that supposed to mean? It’s a little windy and chilly today, maybe I want to be warmed up a little. So, why not? What’s so bad about a “Thermal” area?

Sign:Hazardous Ground - Thin Crust - Boiling Water

What’s that supposed to mean?

 

Sign:Dangerous Ground -with illustration of kid falling into ground and getting broiled-
Children are prone to explode out of the ground unexpectedly?Walkway shown crossing the top of the steaming opening of Green Dragon SpringWhat the heck? Is Green Dragon Spring actually devouring the ground under that walkway?!?! Oh! I get it – you’re saying the park itself can swallow you up and and cook you?
So everything here is flaming hot death, then, right?

Sign:Warning: Trail My Be Icy

Is there no end to the dangers this place threatens innocent visitors with? Can there possibly be anything else this park can do to us?!?!?

 

Solfatara: Very Dangerous Landscape spewing Sulfuric Acid Gas!
“Thin Crust”? “Boiling Water”? Broiled flesh cooked in acid? Ice?
Is this a park, or the kitchen at a Chinese restaurant? Is this how “Hot and Sour Soup” is made?!?!? Is there nothing that can stand in this realm of violent burning chemical death without fear!?!?!?
Fearless Geyser

But what of us poor, fragile fleshy people? We aren’t safe here!That does it! I’m getting out of here! No more of these horrible Killer Thermal Death Areas of Doom for me! I think maybe I’ll just go look at the nice cuddly animals that Yellowstone is also famous for.
Sign: Caution - Wild Animals are Unpredictable and Dangerous!
This whole friggin’ place wants to gore, dismember, maul, cook, devour, and digest me! That does it. No more of this dangerous stuff for me – I think I’ll just go read a nice book for a while…
Bookstore:Closed
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooo!!!!!!

Yatta! I Fail to Reject the Null-Scholarship!

(Oops, got so excited I got carried away with the title. Fixed now.)

I am thrilled to notice this morning that I am in the running for the College Blogging Scholarship, honestly, if this even attracts a larger population of active readers, I’ll consider that alone an excellent “Runner-Up” prize.

Not that the scholarship money wouldn’t be much appreciated…but more about that later.

For the moment though: Hello, current and new readers, to the internet’s self-proclaimed foremost authority on Expired JellO, among other things. I suppose that since I’m asking people to vote for me, I should probably give a quick description of myself and this blog. I’ll keep it short for the moment:

My actual name is Sean Clark; the explanation for the “Epicanis” handle deserves a post of its own. I am a “non-traditional” student at Idaho State University, working on finishing my long-overdue B.S. in Microbiology. This is actually the 5th college institution I’ve attended. It’s not that I’ve been kicked out of the others or anything, just that I keep having to move and start over. I’m finally in one place here long enough to actually finish the degree. Where I end up doing my graduate work depends on where (and if) we end up moving next year – I’ll post about this if anybody’s interested.

My primary interest is in “applied” microbiology, particularly non-medical biotechnology. I’ve been convinced for many years that non-medical applications of microbial biotechnology are underappreciated and somewhat neglected, and I’d rather people not have to get sick before they can benefit from whatever I might come up with…

Incidentally, Hillary Clinton agrees with me (“we should increase investments in non-health applications of bio-technology” – see paragraph 23). Whether that helps or harms my position no doubt depends on your political opinions, but still, I appreciate that someone with some kind of official authority agrees with me. And, hey, maybe this means I’ll be able to find a decent job during or after graduate school. Anybody think the Office of Technology Assessment will be hiring again soon?…

This blog itself is primarily concerned with sharing some of my education, and science in particular, as an exercise in communicating science. I, for one, think I’ve gotten better as the blog has progressed.

A couple of important points: This is a blog, not a magazine: participation is encouraged. If nothing else, the voting for the scholarship looks like it goes on for a couple of weeks, so if you are thinking to yourself “Gosh, I’d vote for you, but you don’t talk enough about X” or “you talk too much about Y” or “I hate the background color of the webpage” or whatever, now’s your chance to speak up. You do not need to be logged in to comment (but I do screen comments, so spammers: you’re wasting both your time and mine), so please do. Also consider subscribing to the RSS feed, found in the upper-right area of the page.

I try to update at least a couple of times each week, though lately I’ve managed to maintain a nearly daily pace. Participation helps here, as comments from readers helps me come up with additional topics to post on. I’m getting a lot of enjoyment out of blogging, so I’ll post as often as I reasonably can…

One last quick note on using this blog: I try to put title tags on most special bits of posts, like images and links. And…bits of text like this, which you might think of as “inline footnotes”. If you hover over anything with that thick-dotted-underline, you should see some additional information. As of a week or two ago, if you click on them, the entire extra text will pop up in a separate box where you can read it all, assuming you don’t have javascript turned off. I haven’t yet gotten around to going back and doing this to the previous bits like this, but I will eventually.

So, again, welcome. Comments, questions, and suggestions will help me improve the blog, and are therefore strongly encouraged. Oh, yes, and please vote for me. Otherwise, I’m going to have to resort to selling blood plasma and begging outside of scientific conferences. Thanks.

Environmental Chemistry Field Trip – Day 1, Part 3

There were two more stops on the first day of the field trip. After Appolinaris Spring, we stopped off at the “Sheepeater Cliffs”, named after the local natives’ use of mountain-goats for food. I did get a picture of the small cliff, but who cares. You’ve seen one columnar basalt formation, you’ve seen them all, right?

Oh, well, in case you haven’t seen even one yet, here’s one:

Columnar Basalt Formation: Sheepeater Cliffs, Yellowstone National Park

It’s actually kind of interesting – despite the fact that Yellowstone is essentially one gigantic crater left by a volcano explosion, lava doesn’t seem to be a common feature at all. The reason seems to be that the volcanic explosion was an explosion of steam, not melted rocks. Put simply, water seeps down into the ground and gets trapped on top of magma, which is naturally extremely hot. The water can’t boil away as steam, though, because it’s trapped under all that rock, which keeps the pressure high enough that it stays liquid even when it’s superheated. Then, one day (about 600,000 years ago, if I remember correctly) somewhere a crack opened up enough to start letting the water flow out. When it got out from under all the rocks, the reduction of pressure let the superhot water suddenly explode into a cloud of steam. As the water shot out as steam, it let off some of the pressure on the water still trapped underground, which could then also explode into steam….and the whole area got flung into the air on the exploding, superhot steam. Kind of like the way a perfectly innocent looking bottle of heavily carbonated beverage can suddenly erupt in a spray of bubbles if you open it too suddenly.

Or at least, that’s my I’m-not-a-Geologist understanding of the process. The point is, melted rocks aren’t really a big part of the park area’s surface, so it’s interesting to see the basalt cliffs here. The giant hexagonal columns are actually huge crystals of that formed as the melted rock solidified.

This was just a brief stop, though. We piled back into the field-trip vehicles and headed for the Mammoth area of the park. I was originally going to cram that stop into this post, too, but I’m still editing it down to make it less pedantic. Unless my Vast Horde of Loyal Readers would LIKE pedantic…

Incidentally, the College Blogging Scholarship submissions are done as of midnight tonight. Or midnight tomorrow morning, depending on whether you think of midnight as the end or beginning of a day. Finalists get announced on Monday. Here’s hoping I’ll be one of them. That also means that if anyone has any suggestions or comments about how I’m running the blog, the topics I’m picking, and so on, now would be a good time to speak up…

Meanwhile, a couple more posts on the field trip coming up (possibly another one later today) and then I’ll move on to other topics.

Environmental Chemistry Field Trip – Day 1, part 2

Our next stop was Appolinaris Spring, which seems to be an uncommon thing in Yellowstone National Park: ordinary springwater. No sulfuric acid, no steam, just plain old water that sinks into the ground and then comes back up later. For most of the park’s history, it seems like this used to be a popular place to stop to get a drink of water.

water emerging from small copper pipes
Although the signs around the spring now all suggest that you really shouldn’t drink it, at least not without filtering it first, I’m kind of kicking myself now for not having tasted it. Perhaps I’ll have to go back on my own time and try it.

Our on-site tests showed a pH of 5.9 (slightly acidic: milk is normally around 6.8 or so, Root Beer somewhere around a more acidic 4.0, cola beverages around 3.0, for reference…), relatively low TDS of about 100ppm, coming out of the ground cool (about 7°C, or 43°F), with very little dissolved Oxygen (about 6.0ppm) and faintly carbonated (300ppm CO2). It reportedly didn’t taste too good, but having foolishly missed out on tasting it, I don’t know why.

There were hints that perhaps contamination from surface water – like rain trickling through bison poo – but quite some time ago they sealed the spring up to protect it from that kind of thing. This is the actual spring now:

Appolinaris Spring is a concrete box in the ground with locked metal tops...
Even so, the signs still try to discourage people from drinking the water coming from the pipes that lead out of the spring, which I take to be the park service covering themselves just in case someone claims to get sick from it. (“Hey, we TOLD you not to drink it!”).

Appolinaris: This spring water has been used by visitors since early days of the park. However modern water tests show periodic contamination. Park waters, even though clear and running are subject to pollution by wildlife. As with all untreated water, purify before drinking.
Periodic pollution by wildlife? What the…

The northern end of a south-bound bisonOh, right. Natural bottled-spring-water flavor. Hey, it’s natural, it’s got to be good for you, right?

And to end this post on a complete and totally baffling non-sequitur: the student lounge I’m sitting in right now has a television constantly tuned to some cheesy mass-media channel. Today it’s “E!®”. I overheard something on it just now that made me sit up and take notice: Evidently “Leprechaun” made a profit. Wow.

One never knows what kind of amazing things one might learn at college…

Environmental Chemistry Field Trip – Day 1, part 1

I can think of a number of things to complain about with regards to living where I do. However, it is nice that we live near enough to Yellowstone to day-trip there. In fact, it’s close enough for my local college to take field-trips there – which we did.

Environmental Chemistry spent the weekend there, examining the area, discussing the chemistry of the natural waters and geothermal features, and collecting samples (yes, we had a permit for this…).

We started with a stop by the side of the Madison River to collect a sample of the surface water. Clear, cool (12°C, or about 55°F), mildly basic (pH of about 8.0), and a TDS reading of about 300ppm, which is roughly the same as mildly to moderately hard tapwater, I suppose.

sampling water from the Madison river

The sampling device -seen being hurled over the water here – is kind of interesting – it’s a hollow tube (a bit of plastic pipe) with two spring-loaded balls that slam shut on either end to trap the water inside when you tug on the string. That lets you throw the device out and trigger it when it gets to the precise spot that you want to take a sample from.

We made a brief stop at Beryl Spring afterwards. We didn’t do any sampling here, but we did talk about acid-sulfate water systems. “Reduced” sulfur – as Hydrogen Sulfide gas – comes boiling out from underground along with steam, and ends up being oxidized by oxygen from the air to become sulfate in the end – combining with the water and forming sulfuric acid.

Sulfur-encrusted pipe at Beryl Spring

Of course, it doesn’t go from sulfide to sulfate all at once. There’s a stop along the way as elemental sulfur. The whitish-yellow stuff here is crystals of elemental sulfur. The black stuff you see is…also crystals of elemental sulfur. The difference is just how the atoms of sulfur collect together. The black form is actually a little less stable than the yellow, so it tends to form first, but then slowly convert to the yellow form over time as the sulfur atoms settle into a more stable arrangement. Being a chemistry class, we didn’t really discuss the possible microbial activity that might be involved here. Note the small patch of dark-green there. I suppose this could be a “Green Sulfur Bacteria“, which does something like photosynthesis except that it makes sulfur instead of oxygen in the process. These are normally anaerobic but perhaps the concentration of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and carbon dioxide gas coming out of the ground right there is enough to crowd out the oxygen. Alternatively, it could just be a heat-loving cyanobacterium or something.

I really wish I wasn’t too poor to buy a good field microscope to go along with the good lab microscope that I am also too poor to buy…

The last two stops of the day – Appolinaris Spring and Narrow Gauge Spring – will be in the next post…

This weekend should be worth at least one decent post…

This weekend, one of the two of this semester’s classes that I have not yet used for a “what I learned in school today” post took a field trip.

Yes, Our “Environmental Chemistry” lab went to Yellowstone National Park and (legally – we had a permit and everything) did some water sampling. We got some on-site lectures about the types of water systems in the park, considerations involved in sampling things, and so on. All in all, I thought it was pretty interesting, but after spending the entire weekend either driving to or from the park or walking around in the park I’m a bit exhaustipated. Plus, bummed out that I can’t afford a good portable field microscope to go with the regular microscope which I also can’t afford. Woe unto me. I imagine the permit we had would have allowed me to also dangle some slides in the water to look at.

I did record a GPS track of both days field-trips, I got ICBM addresses for our sampling sites, and a number of photographs with my cheap and ancient digital camera along the way. Give me some time and I’ll get at least one real post out of it.

Meanwhile, a bit of trivia: “The Microsoft Network” search system is pretty Fupped Duck. I do get the occasional obviously relevant hit from one of their searches, but the great majority seems to be “hits” from random one-word searches, many of which seem to refer to words that appear nowhere on the site (and others of which are so broad I have no idea how many pages some MSN user would have to click through before hitting my site. For example, while I like to think I’m making a reasonable effort to do interesting science blogging, I’m having trouble imagining that this blog would show up in the first few pages for a search consisting solely of the word “science”…which one of the recent hits seemed to show.

Actually, this probably has less to do with users than with Microsoft itself – the hits for this don’t appear to be loading real views (it pulls one page and doesn’t reference, for example, images) though it is coming from “The Microsoft Network” addresses. Perhaps Microsoft has one of their bots masquerading as a real user (the user-agent string looks like regular “Internet Explorer 7″)…even the IP address resolves to a bogus name ” bl2sch1082217.phx.gbl.”, for example) which doesn’t resolve back the other way. Of course, it’s also possible the hit is ENTIRELY bogus and the “referer” tag that seems to indicate this is also faked. Perhaps it’s time to start blocking Microsoft…or maybe just messing with them. This apparent standards abuse and obfuscation of what exactly it is that they’re trying to do with my blog (and messing up my logs!) kind of bugs me. (Moral of the story is probably “Everybody should just use Google“…)

Sure “Cardboard Sarcophagus Instructions” is a pretty weird search, too, coming from Google, but at least I know why THAT one got here. I doubt the searcher – possibly from the Memphis, Tennessee area – was really searching for metaphors for expired JellO boxes.

The Unbearable Limeness of Being

I awaken. Am I alive? The temperature is neither extremely hot nor extremely cold, so I’m apparently not in some punishment-afterlife. And there’s no beer volcano or stripper-factory, so this obviously isn’t heaven. On the other hand, I am experiencing the usual persistent discomfort involved with waking up early in the morning. On the assumption that Catholic “purgatory” would be more dull, I will assume I am still alive, and had better get up and get to class.

Since my previous experiment, I have obviously had to revise my original hypothesis. Since the last caused me no ill effects, I had to abandon the notion that expired gelatin products become a deadly poison. Instead, as I consume this batch of official, non-sugarless Jell-O®-brand Gelatin (Lime flavored), I operate on a new hypothesis:

“Expired instant gelatin products from intact packaging will not harm me if I eat it.”

My precious stock of expired JellO® is depleted by one more box, the packet ripped from its cardboard sarcophagus, the contents prepared according to the standard instructions, and consumed hastily last night (the animation from the previous post is the actual container of prepared Lime JellO® made from digital photographs taken between helpings.). You can see the old-style date code on the box. According to Carolyn Wyman’s “JELL-O: A Biography”, the code indicates that it was packaged in 2003 (the “3” at the beginning of the code), on the 343rd day of the year, in the San Leandro (California) packaging facility. Although there is no official “expiration date” shown, given the “expected shelf life” of 24 months, this package is approximately 2 years out of date. And I ate it. I appear to have suffered no ill effects. Not even a decent sugar-rush: the entire box contains 320 calories, barely equivalent to a package of Twinkies®. The flavor even appeared to be perfectly normal. Mmmmmm, Lime JellO…

When I took it out to eat it, I did spot a beautiful if alarming sight, though:

The crystalline-appearing sheets of growth from the edge of the bowl into the gelatin was slightly disturbing. Was I crystallizing something odd out of the gelatin/sugar/flavor solution? The growth resembled infiltration of mold into the gelatin medium enough to slightly worry me. But only slightly.

In fact, as I had most suspected, these turned out to be ice crystals. Quite pretty, but they started slowly melting away after the bowl was allowed to sit at room temperature for fifteen minutes or so – plus, they crunched when I ate them just like ice. Thus encouraged, I ate the gelatin and went to bed. And here I am (sitting in the student lounge between “History of Western Art” and “Introduction to Philosophy”) happily blogging away, apparently unharmed.

Does this prove that expired instant gelatin is harmless? Well, no, not exactly. Scientists never really “prove” anything. Instead, we attempt to “falsify” our hypotheses and theories as best we can. This is where the concept of the “null hypothesis” comes in.

The “Null Hypothesis” here is the situation that, if true, falsifies my hypothesis. In this case, it would be “Expired instant gelatin products from intact packaging will harm me if I eat it.”. However, I did eat expired gelatin products from an intact package and was NOT harmed. Therefore I must “reject the Null Hypothesis”…and therefore my experimental evidence does not fail to support my hypothesis! SUCCESS!

If we are unable to find a condition which renders our hypothesis or theory incorrect after many and varied tests, ideally by several different researchers, then we can be confident that our hypothesis or theory is correct, but we don’t necessarily KNOW that there isn’t some odd undiscovered exception that we don’t know about.

Two samples (this one and the previous sugarless-orange one) is hardly a large number of trials. This doesn’t prove that expired JellO® is always safe, but since I know of no plausible way by which an intact package of instant gelatin could become hazardous I feel pretty comfortable that expired gelatin from intact packaging won’t harm me.

If the package is not intact and contains a fuzzy green lump instead of the usual powder, then it’s a whole other situation, obviously…

I do still have three or four more boxes of the sugarless generic expired gelatin – perhaps I can come up with some more tests. Meanwhile, I do hope that my incredibly brave, life-threatening experiments here will relax nervous expired-JellO eaters everywhere…