rebecca's pocket

While I am all for anything that helps smash the mental shackles of functional fixedness, I think the list of 10 'non-cooking' things you can do with a microwave is a bit lame - or at least misnamed/inconsistent. A better title for the list as written would be 'Things you can heat up in a microwave that aren't food, and why you would want to.', though with that title it could easily expand to hundreds of entries.

Back to the existing list:

Since heating foods and drying foods for cooking are arguably part of cooking/food preperation - and are tasks one might otherwise do with a stove/oven these shouldn't be in a list of 'non-cooking' tasks, so removing those from the list I see only four things from the list you can do with a microwave that aren't really cooking...

1) Sterilizing things. This is a valid non-cooking use for a microwave, but whether it's soil, sponges, jars, underwear, socks, xmas ornaments, or toothbrushes, sterilizing things is one task, so should be one entry on the list - not multiple items for each thing you might sterilize. (where would the list stop if you itemized every possible item you could sterilize?)

2) Heating non-food things up. e.g. Dye solutions, plates, rice filled heating pads, etc.

3) Adding moisture back to non-food substances that have dried out.

4) Melting non-food materials.