Is popped corn unique like snowflakes or are there a finite number of forms?
Unless I am mistaken (and someone will shortly come along who is smarter than me) there is not an infinite variety in snowflakes. Due to the size of snowflakes and ice crystals, there are only so many configurations possible.
Popcorn, I would guess would have a near infinite variety.
In both cases, there is only a finite number of possible forms, but that finite number is so insanely ridiculously ludicrously combinatorically huge that you might as well call it infinite.
has anyone cataloged popcorn kernels as snow flakes have been cataloged?
When I said that someone smarter than me would come along, I didn’t know it would be someone THAT much smarter.
Yeah, I guess there are also only so many ways to arrange ‘popcorn’ molecules, too.
Is it true that in a significant snowflall there are actually thousands of identical snowflakes?
The number of snowflakes in a snowfall is only, at most, astronomically huge. That’s far short of insanely ridiculously ludicrously combinatorically huge.
Ah, so I was 4 words-that-end-in-ly orders of magnitude off.
No.
Snowflakes dissolve if you put either salt or melted butter on them.
Popcorn is therefore superior.
The two main types of popped kernels (called, coincidentally, “flakes”) are butterfly and mushroom. Don’t know if anyone has taken it beyond that.
Personally, I rather liked the “insanely, combinatorically huge” part, of that statement. 
But the “ridiculously, ludicrously” part, sounded… I dunno… redundant? Just sayin’…
ROFLMAO! I just love the “snarcasm”, here on the SDMB! 
To give some numbers about the snowflakes, some physicist somewhere apparently claims that the total number of possible snowflakes that can be considered different is about 10[SUP]158[/SUP], and that the total number of snowflakes that has ever fallen on the earth is 10[SUP]30[/SUP]. I’m really not sure I buy the 158, but there you go.
(If accurate, we can quantify “words-that-end-in-ly orders of magnitude.” Each ly that gets added seems to be about 32 regular orders of magnitude.)
Hm, it’s only fitting that we should be able to indicate a power of -ly simply with a greek letter. Are the are any still available?
Been reading Farmer Boy, have you?
I’d expect the number of possible snowflakes to be much greater than 10[sup]158[/sup] (that’s merely insanely combinatoric, not ridiculously or ludicrously), but maybe the constraints set by the crystalline structure are enough to get it down that low. Popcorn isn’t crystalline, though, so those limits wouldn’t apply.
And I added the extra adverbs because you’re not just taking a combinatoric calculation, but a combinatoric calculation that starts with numbers that are already astronomically large. Nor would I recommend associating a number of orders of magnitude with each adverb, because combinatorics grow too fast for that.
Yes, but these are special orders of SUPER-magnitude. And stuff.
I think more repetitively redunadant.
I believe that the cite I was looking at, that I can’t find, was trying to figure out how many different snowflakes there are that would not be considered “close enough” to looking the same as each other. So that lowers the numbers a bit. And even if this is a lower bound, the sheer size of the gap between those that could exist and those that have existed makes it all but impossible that any two are the same.
(On the more facetious note, maybe we could take ly orders of magnitude in a different sense, like each additional ly is the square perhaps the previous order of magnitude. Or they could work like factorials in some sense. Or something. I’ve been playing around with the numbers, and they don’t make sense, so I’ll get back to this when I have more time to figuring it out.)
Perhaps you meant, “redundantly, repetitive”?