| Monday, April 04, 2005

This is the Paper I told you about on January 21st.


On Friday, January 7, we were each given a red pepper to perform a statistical analysis of. Each student picked a pepper out of a bag and was required to collect different kinds of data. The peppers were similar in many ways and different in others. I was one of the last ones to receive my pepper, and it was pretty injured, as it was stuck at the bottom of the bag. It was slightly dried out where it had been taken off of the stem for a while and left in the bag. I then took the pepper to my room where it lived on my desk and began to dry out more over the long weekend and the rest of this week, as I tend to procrastinate. My pepper is very likely to be lighter and smaller than the others, being that it has had almost a week to dry out.
When measured with an inch ruler, the pepper was 3.2 inches from the tip of the stem to the very end. Because it had time to dry out more, when it was weighed, it was only 0.67 grams. The stem itself was brown and measured 0.75 inches. The pepper itself was a dark crimson color with the tip black where it had dried out. The area where the stem meets the pepper was a yellow-orange color. After these observations were made, I opened the pepper and observed the inside and counted the seeds. The inside was a darker crimson color, with a bit of white fuzz near the top (possibly where it had been sitting on my desk in the sunlight??). The seed count was 147, plus a small cluster covered in white fuzz. To estimate, I would say that the pepper contained a maximum of 160 seeds.
Through further investigation, by my roommate and our friend, we discovered that this mysterious, questionable white fuzz was in fact, to our dismay, MOLD!!! Due to the fact that there was moisture locked into my pepper that was left in the sun, it grew mold. Because of this strange, yet greatly familiar growth, I was very apprehensive to test the hotness of my pepper. If I had to guess, I would say that my red pepper was fairly hot.


[[ 5:42 PM ]]

i love hamsters`