Mine is this little tidbit about Khaki’s from https://www.heddels.com/2019/05/history-khaki-anything-drab/

“Tried and tested by all the major powers, khaki-dyed, lightweight cotton twills became the de facto uniform for any colonizing power. If you were going to ship your boys abroad to pillage and conquer someplace in the Southern Hemisphere, khaki was your go-to color.”

  • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.auEnglish
    61·
    2 months ago

    The first microwave ovens created were being used to gently re-warm frozen live hamsters, because when they tried to reheat the hamsters with conventional cooking methods, they heated unevenly and burned at the edges, which isn’t good for the hamsters.

      • dmention7@midwest.social
        10·
        2 months ago

        You ain’t got the balls! No. Balls.

        I probably got that wrong, but it’s also been at least 20 years since I last pressed those blender buttons.

      • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
        15·
        2 months ago

        On high, yes. Lower and intermittent power in micro wave heats far more evenly than an oven

      • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.auEnglish
        111·
        2 months ago

        Modern ones do have hotspots and cold spots because of resonance and design tradeoffs, but I don’t think that was a problem for the hamster application. IDK, maybe they were structured a little more small and special-purpose, but regardless it was just penetrating radiation basically all throughout the hamster which is better than heating it from the outside in and having the heat having to conduct its way through the frozen tissue.

        Basically the same reason you can defrost meat in the microwave, but you can’t throw it in the oven to defrost more quickly without also cooking the edges.

          • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.auEnglish
            62·
            2 months ago

            Microwaves penetrate a certain distance into the material and then turn into heat. Heat conduction from the outside doesn’t. I don’t know exactly what the average of that distance is and how it compares to the size of a hamster, but I would bet that it’s pretty competitive with the thickness of the hamster.

            Your whole argument here makes no sense at all. Having the ambient temperature set to the perfect defrosting value would work better than heating the skin of the frozen meat in cycles of full on / full off, if the microwaves were getting stopped right at the skin and then the heat had to conduct in from there.

              • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
                21·
                2 months ago

                But you’re incorrect. Microwaves penetrate through many substances fairly well, mostly passing through them. The microwave ovens we use to cook are tuned to resonate with water molecules, and as a result the waves interact more frequently with those molecules. But in general, the waves just bounce around until they do interact with something, and it could be any particle within your hot pocket that it interacts with, not just the surface.

                All that is to say, microwaves do heat all throughout whatever you put in. Now, these waves can also excite particles and moisture in the air within the oven, and there is convection between the air and your hot pocket… But air is less dense than food, so convection will be secondary heating at best, and cooling at worst.

                • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.auEnglish
                  2·
                  2 months ago

                  Yeah. They don’t penetrate an unlimited distance into the food, the center of some stuff won’t get heated. But they penetrate a lot further than the 0 distance that ambient heat from the outside does, conducting heat straight to the skin of the food and then letting it work its way in from there.

                  No idea what this person’s issue is, I sort of suspect that it’s just Lemmy in action, doing its thing.

                  • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
                    2·
                    2 months ago

                    You will find it is entirely dependent on the size, thickness, and density of the food you’re heating.

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
      81·
      2 months ago

      They were invented because a microwave radar unit melted the chocolate in a guys pocket.

      • Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world
        8·
        2 months ago

        That’s actually one of those Urban legends things. The guy made it intentionally to Cook and it was later refined to had stacks of die punched metal sheets instead of the carefully machined blocks.

    • DoGeeseSeeGod@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
      4·
      2 months ago

      Ok what the fuck. Is there a source beyond the youtube video I don’t want to watch right now. That’s pretty wild claim. The few sites I visit seem to reference the YouTube video as the source