Strange Things Cooked Up On Internet
by Dean Terry
I’m sure you’ve all seen the story, where scientists cooked an egg by placing it between two activated cell phones. Or how about the ads for a tiny oven, which fits into a 5 1/4” drive bay in your computer, so you can bake cookies without leaving your desk? It doesn’t take much searching to find some rather amazing things on the internet. But are all of them for real?
COOKING AN EGG USING TWO CELL PHONES
The Story:
Recently, news media has reported a study showing the radiation from cell phones is so full of energy they can be used to cook eggs.
In the experiment, researchers placed one egg in a porcelain cup (because it is easy to conduct heat,) and put one cell phone on one side and another cell phone on the other. The researchers then called from one cell phone to another and kept the cell phones on after connecting.
During the first 15 minutes, nothing changed. After 25 minutes, however, the egg shell started to become hot and at 40 minutes, the surface of the egg became hard and bristled. Researchers found the protein in the egg had become solid although the egg yolk was still in liquid form. After 65 minutes, the whole egg was well cooked.
The Source:
In 2000, the web site Wymsey Village Web published a spoof article Weekend Eating: Mobile Cooking about using two mobile phones to cook an egg. The implications of this information were obvious: If cell phones could cook an egg inside its shell, imagine what they might be doing to your brain!
Charlie Ivermee, the founder of the site (which is presented as the online home of a fictional English village), explained that he penned the piece to poke fun at precisely those kinds of technological fears. He explained, “There was a lot of concern about people’s brains getting fried and being from a radio/electronics background I found it all rather silly. So I thought I’d add to the silliness.”
Although this story still remains popular with those who want to warn us of the dangers of radiation exposure - it’s a hoax.
PC EZ-BAKE OVEN
The Advertisement:
Who can forget the joy of mixing up a tiny cake mix and cooking it with the warm glow of a light bulb? Now the computer savvy among us can relive the fun of having your very own personal mini-oven with the PC Ez-Bake oven! It fits in a 5 1/4” drive bay and plugs right into your power supply with the included Molex connector. Also included is PC Ez-Cook the open-source oven controller software with hundreds of easy and creative recipes for your PC Ez-Bake oven, and even a fuzzy-logic cooking control system to precisely measure the doneness of your cake, cookie, or cheese souffle. The PC Ez-Bake oven can even be used to cook your Pop Tarts, Bagel Bites, or any tiny or flat food. YUM!
Other features include:
- * 1 replacement light bulb
* 1 additional tiny pan
* 6 Mixes for your PC Ez-Bake oven: Chocolate Cake, Vanilla Cake, Peanut Butter Cookie, Chocolate Chip Cookie, and Caffeinated Meatloaf (comes dehydrated)
* Special office friendly recipes including Duck Sauce Packet Tart, Vending Machine Casserole, and Non-Dairy Creamer Creme Brulee
The Source:
This is an item that was offered for sale by Thinkgeek.com an online retailer of offbeat gadgets. They have a multiyear tradition of posting fake gadgets on April 1st.
The luxury of creating warm gooey snacks, without ever leaving you computer, probably appeals to the geek in all of us. But alas, this too is a hoax.
Copyright © 2008 Our Strange World
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T on Friday, July 11, 2008I work with radio frequency machines that, without having guards on them, can interfere with airplane control towers. They create the same amount of power as 4 electric chairs. When put on a radiation meter, it reads 4-5 miliwatt (with guards on 10kw machine). If someone is calling your cell phone, and you use the same meter on it, it jumps up to 50 miliwatt.
