Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/please-dont-microwave-your-l.html
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For regular books without the RFID tag, I think it’s a cool idea. The antithesis of cooking fish in the microwave, filling the workplace with the smell of old books.
/s
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On the other hand, this is an excellent way to foil those pesky RFID tracking chips.
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Super-unlikely to ever be effective. The way microwaves are designed, getting the overall book hot enough – especially since it’s made of very porous materials – will almost inevitably cause scorching, glue failure and other issues, due to the uneven nature of microwave heating. Hot spots and differences in behavior between various book materials pretty much guarantee this.
tl;dr? You’d have far more luck with a carefully-set standard oven.
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Microwaving books is what you do for bookworms or other insects. They’ll heat up real fast, while the book basically doesn’t.
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I don’t think a microwave can bring a book to the requisite 451℉.
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I microwaved a cookie recently, and after only about 15 seconds it was smoking and had a huge scorch in the middle, I burned my finger picking it up.
It didn’t occur to me until the next day, looking at the blister on my finger, that there must have been a chunk of metal inside the cookie. That microwave may have saved me from harm. Now I microwave everything, cheese, cereal, ice cream, aspirin . . . just to be safe.
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Came to check for the obligatory reference, left satisfied.
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A couple months ago my mom (who is usually pretty smart about this kind of thing) embarrassingly admitted having scorched a whole lot of cash in the microwave, which she had gotten to pay the salary of my grandma’s home health worker. Foil strips and magnetic ink don’t react well to microwave radiation. It wasn’t completely destroyed but she had to send it to that group in the Treasury Department that examines “Mutilated” currency to exchange it for new cash.
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Local library here is quarantining all returns for 72 hours before making them available again. Seems excessive since there’s no evidence of transmission by packaging (per CDC).
I guess I’ll stick to microwaving DVD rentals.
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I’ve heard a story that nowadays (since 2000s) fraudsters microwave some fake documents to make them look older and them claim that they possess some plot of public land in Brazil.
It seems to be faster and easier than use a box with crickets to age the paper.
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On a nearly unrelated topic, how did a Seattle (where I used to live) station do a report on a Grand Rapids (where, ironically, I also used to live) library? Just one of those things? WZZM, you’re falling down on the job!
No evidence of transmission, but it is a simple thing to do with no serious downsides and matches well with the data on lifetime of sars-cov-2 on paper and cardboard surfaces.
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the wavelength if microwaves is larger than a virus … microwave radiation is not likely to be effective.
Unless you can get those books up to be too hot to touch, you’re wasting your time damaging books. Luckily coronavirus is not easily transferred from surfaces and doesn’t survive long. There are other viruses that are way better at this.
P.S. I’ve never caught a cold from a book.
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Frequency 4.51 GHz
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Under the right conditions, some food will arc.
Two weeks ago, my microwave arced when a grain of rice got caught under the wheel of the carousel mechanism. The little wheel almost melted enough to be unuseable.
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Most libraries are following the guidelines of the REALM project: https://www.webjunction.org/news/webjunction/test1-results.html. They’ve been studying how long the virus can survive on specific types of library materials.
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I have, however, pretended to have a cold in order to get a day off to finish a book.
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We used to have an industrial-grade microvave that would cook fuckin’ anything in about 8 minutes max. I put a potato in it once that had grown round and encysted a bit of gravel. it was quite the lightshow.
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