Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does a bowl of hard-boiled eggs count as "contained"? It's not sealed.
Are they shelled?
Is the shell part of the food, or not? =)
What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?
61–70 of 87 posts
Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?
#62Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?
#63Reminds me of a question I have been wondering about: Can you formally specify what is the purpose of a suitcase? In principle, you could dump all your clothes, toiletries, etc. in a pile on the airport checkin counter, and if system were organized enough, it could deliver all your stuff to hawaii and lay it all out on the hotel bed for you. E.g., a robot would scan all your belongings at the airport, and dump them a…
I can invent on the spot 10 uses for a suitcase that have nothing to do with moving things belonging to a single person together. First of all, you may have a couple packing their items in one suitcase. The suitcase may be used as a chair, as a table, as a structural support, to protect from rain, sun, lasers, alpha and beta radiation, it can be used as a weapon or as a shield, as a makeshift hammer, etc. The problem…
> "Purpose" is not something that is a part of an item. It is a part of our mind.
I love this insight.
Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
* Puff pastry that needs to be chilled for five minutes so that the butter doesn't melt into the flour before you do the next roll. * Jello that needs to be set * Sprouted beans / seeds for which you want to restrict the rate of growth
"Any contained item that can fit inside a refrigerator, whose quality would be better if kept at 1-4°C rather than at room temperature by the time it's used/consume."
I've definitely just placed a stalk of broccoli on the bottom shelf of my fridge with no container.
Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?
#65The question is wrong, as it stands the answer is "any non-fluid or contained fluid that will fit". "What should one store in a refrigerator?" is a better question.
I would argue that pretty much anything you would put into your refrigerator is contained inside packaging. Sometimes that packaging is just a simple plate.
I put a lot of fruit and vegetables in my fridge with no packaging. Why would I contain them?
Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?
#66The original spec, "Anything that fits into a refrigerator," is a pretty darn good one. It conforms to Postel's law: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others". We can develop a spec in a vacuum, but we can't be sure what users actually want from our refrigerator. Maybe a live penguin actually does belong in there, as in the famous children's novel.
Can you put a baby or pet into a refrigerator? What about a freezer?
Well, it isn't the refrigerator that's going to stop you.
Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only because people break the first part of the law. Postel's law is absolutely crucial for communication between independent systems.
Ignoring the reality of what people chose to ignore will end up making you very unhappy.
The alternative is even more against reality of what people do -- e.g. the classic proposal for a web browsers which would only accept very strict HTML (and this would supposedly make people fix their websites). In practice it would only have hindered the adoption of the web.
Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?
#68This essay assumes the wrong answer. The intelligence has to be built into the item, not the appliance, just as we do now. Packages have messages such as "Refrigerate after opening" on them. Anything that needs to be refrigerated will need to communicate that need, along with details such as temp, to the automated system.
We cannot always change the real world to adopt to our spec needs -- e.g. make things that need refrigerated communicate that need.
There are literary thousands of things we refrigerate that don't come in packages with neat "refrigirate" labels.
Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?
#69Anything that you can fit in and that you can also easily get out again. (The latter requirement rules out not only liquids but also e.g. a pile of salt or rice.)
So, your pet cat?
Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?
#70Fun read. This reminds me of how "object-oriented" programming goes wrong for beginners. ...Not helped, alas, by all of the texts that thing it's helpful to demonstrate OO concepts by modeling things like "cat is a subclass of animal" :/