> you drop an m&m into a glass of water, the entire "m" will
> float off into the water, intact.

You want to know. I know you do. I tried the experiment. I can easily admit that watching the m&m slowly dissolve in a glass of water was one of the most fascinating things I've seen in months.

Seconds after you drop the m&m in the water its skin starts to pucker, taking on the apparent texture of a grapefruit. Then it begins to tighten up and it starts to look like the head of a very, very old bald guy or some brainy, supersmart, humanoid space alien from a bad 50s film. It stays like this for some time until you notice that it's beginning to look like a pumice stone or that brain-like coral or maybe even the foothills of the Sierras as seen from an airplane when the skin kind of cracks and you're trying not to think about burn victims and all of a sudden, like placenta (I'm guessing here) it drops away in this slow-mo, upside-down nuclear mushroom cloud action.

But on the top of the candy there's this little bit of skin still bonded to the sickly, white undercoating and in the middle is the "m" and you're thinking, it's not coming off, these people are nuts (actually, by now you're thinking that no matter how the experiment is going) and then, like a baby bird pecking its way out of an egg, one little "m" leg breaks free and floats up, very, very slowly like an astronaut in zero-g and it pulls along the middle "m" leg with it through the power of momentum (I'm telling you, it really is science-like; you're going to feel like Pasteur).

Maybe in your experiment the final leg will break free with a joyful ease at this point. In mine I had to wait and wait, watching the last, lonely straining "m" leg cling to the side of the mothership while the other two beckoned, "Let go. Let go! Come, fly with us to the surface. Be free -- don't let it 'n' here!"

Finally the small patch of m&m skin to which the third leg was stubbornly clinging began to slide off the candy, slowly over the sloping side of the chocolate covered peanut, ever so slowly dragging the still clinging "m" down with it. "Oh no," I thought, "the poor 'm' is going to go down and be mired, destroyed in the certainly acidic skin-soup." I frantically plotted a means of intervention as the membrane sank toward the toxic, orange pool with the poor helpless little "m" still captive, when the obstinate leg at long last relinquished its hold on the dying skin and up, up, up the "m" floated -- arriving at the surface a bit twisted but completely whole in its tiny, consonant glory.