I wonder if it's really just a function of how much work is involved in taking care of pets. I have had pet turtles and cats for years. Cats easily require 10x the amount of work to keep them happy and healthy.
or turn the food over, or move it to a different position inside the microwave -- the way microwave works is that it heats up the food unevenly (there's a wave involved).
I don’t really think repositioning it has a direct effect. An indirect effect of moving it around is that you turn the microwave off for around 30 seconds or more in order to do it. The reason some parts increase in heat faster is that they have higher concentrations of water; allowing the water to stop boiling and all of the heat to spread through is the magic.
(I’ve heard the fans that you hear are there to reflect the micro waves and make them bounce all over the place but I don’t know if that’s true. Regardless, most models have a spinning plate which will constantly reposition the food as it cooks.)
The fan you hear is to keep the microwave generator cool. It's outside the part of the microwave where the microwaves go.
Older microwaves had a fan-like metal stirrer inside the cooking box, that would continuously re-randomize where the waves went. This has been out of fashion for several decades.
> The reason some parts increase in heat faster is that they have higher concentrations of water;
Composition is part of it, but it isn’t the whole story. A microwave oven is a resonant cavity. There are standing electromagnetic waves in there, in several different modes. They have peaks and nulls. That’s why many microwaves have a rotating plate. It physically moves the food relative to the standing waves.
Yes, my point was that microwaves are advertised as a 'throw your lunch in and get it warm in 1-2 minutes' appliance, but kinda like an LLM, they require some manual effort to do it well (or decently, depending on your standards).
Like:
1- Put it on the edge of the plate, not in the middle
2- Check every X seconds and give it a stir
3- Don't put metal in
4- Don't put sealed things in
5- Adjust time for wetness
6- Probably don't put in dry things? (I believe you needed water for a microwave to really work? Not sure, haven't tried heating a cup of flour or making a caramel in the microwave)
7- Consider that some things heat weirdly, for example bread heats stupid quick and then turns into stone equally as quick once you take it out.
or it keeps monitoring the web and notify me whenever something that matches my interests shows up -- like a more sophisticated Google alert. I really would love that.
another analogy would be: aliens abducting a bunch of humans and recreating the Stanford Prison Experiment and write up on human society based on that, which ends-up reshaping alien culture.
reasons for recommendation:
- it's an example in the biological science, to complement the heavy representation of examples from computer science and entrepreneurship in this thread
- the main character, Kary Mullis, is colorful and controversial. Not a likable individual, but nevertheless had traits (mostly an unreasonable obsession) that enabled him to make such a discovery
- the discovery of high temperature tolerant enzymes predated Mullis' insight by some two decades, and it played a key role in making PCR practical and widely applicable. this is a pattern I have seen often in major inventions, which were made possible by prior discoveries (often decades old) which lay dormant until someone put everything together. This process of re-discovering the pieces and making connections is also where I think machine learning could be particularly helpful. In fact this is my main motivation for picking up this book (by online reviews, not a particularly well-written one).
thank you for posting this... and this is a common enough pattern (looking up previous HN threads on the same or related article) that I wonder if it's worthwhile to automate this.
I have friends who routinely go for #2 or #3 (occasionally even further down). The typical justification they gave is that one's paying a lot of price premium/marketing cost for #1, whereas with #2/3 one gets comparable or slightly worse quality for a lot cheaper.
