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Comment by russfink | Hacker News Reader

Just how was this discovered? "Hey, no food or drink in the lab. DARN IT - look what you did now!"

That's how we ended up with microwave ovens.

> In 1945, the specific heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer from Howland, Maine. Employed by Raytheon at the time, he noticed that microwaves from an active radar set he was working on started to melt a chocolate bar he had in his pocket.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery

Lol what else was melting if the chocolate in his pocket was melting?

This is only barely related but when we bought our house the (ancient) gas stove was malfunctioning. I looked up the brand (Modern Maid, I think) and was very surprised to learn they were a subsidiary of Raytheon. The thought of a gas appliance made by a weapons manufacturer was, a little unsettling. Replaced that thing pretty quickly.

Don't go looking too deep into ol' General Electric then.

I don't understand this. Were you afraid your stove was a weapon in disguise?

No, it was a joke. I only know Raytheon as a weapons / explosives company. Had no idea they had a consumer products arm at some point (unlike GE which at one point owned everything including film studios, which is fairly common knowledge.) Given that we were concerned we had a leaky gas appliance...

Better throw out all your GE, GM, and even Mattel products then. Nearly every major manufacturer does, or has at one time, been involved in weapons manufacture.

Basically any computing device as well since all the processor manufacturers have defense contracts.

Interestingly there is a rendering of what appears to be a Predator drone on the AMD website:

https://www.amd.com/en/products/embedded-aero-defense-soluti...

Thats it, Im only going to support intel from now on. /s

Also those hipster glass canning jars from Ball.

People: I replaced it because it was malfunctioning, not actually because it had a connection to Raytheon. It was too old to be worth fixing.

I'm wondering if somewhere someone has a program running a simulation on combinations of chemicals to see what would happen.

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