Mosquito

Enter “mosquito microwave” as a search string, click a few top links, and you’ll see the current wisdom as to how mosquitoes avoid death by microwave. Before peeking my thought was, as small as a mosquito is, surely there must be a few molecules of water inside her, and when vibrated by microwave energy they would eventually boil, and the rapidly expanding gas/vapor would pop our summer pest wide open. Isn’t that how corn pops?

Evidently the standing waves in a conventional microwave exhibit some stochastic behavior. That is, the waves are not uniformly active on every molecule of water at every cubic angstrom of space at every instant in time. Explaining why food is unevenly heated, even with a revolving plate.

And why the mosquito that had found its way into our microwave yesterday evening when I put the beans and rice in for thirty seconds, evaded death. It was merely a stochastic luck of the draw. When I opened the door she flew out and flipped me the finger, like I had swatted her hard against my arm, which as every Alaskan knows is insufficient to kill an Alaskan mosquito. It only pisses them off.