seek-fun.com

Goofball Answer:

Curious Party,

I was up past my bedtime last night; I was late for work this morning; and my tongue hurts. But I worked on your question and have come to the best response I feel I can provide. But before we get to the response, let me first describe how I got there.

Procedure: I took 20 each of the following flavors of Tootsie Pop™ brand lollipops: Cherry, Grape, and Chocolate. In a temperature and humidity controlled room I took each lollipop and licked it until I breached the lollipop coating of the Tootsie Roll™. As soon as the Tootsie™ center was exposed to air, I considered the Tootsie™ center "reached" and recorded the number of licks it took me in a data table. I repeated this on each of the twenty pops of each flavor until I'd recorded data for all sixty pops. I alternated flavors—cherry, grape, chocolate—as I licked to mitigate the data-skewing effects of my rapidly fatiguing and swelling tongue. I then performed some simple statistical analysis on the data and recorded the results in a summary graph.

I've provided the minimum number of licks necessary, the maximum number of licks necessary, and the average (mean) licks necessary to breach the Tootsie™ coating.

Note: Others conducting this experiment may get different results. I predict the number of licks necessary to reach the Tootsie™ center will be indirectly proportional to the surface area of the experimenter's tongue and indirectly proportional to the abrasiveness of the experimenter's taste buds.

Warning: To conduct this experiment, I was forced to lick 60 mildly-abrasive lollipops a total of 10,249 times. There is a layer of raw flesh on my tongue, which until healed will prevent me from licking other things with any semblance of dedication to the task. So be careful with this one.

~ topher