Delete prank question - Keep salad cool in microwave

Question

Regarding

How can I keep my salad cold in the microwave?

I think this was never intended to be a real question. Physics should NOT have migrated it to us. I am sure it was a joke or a prank.

The user who asked it has deleted their profile, as evidenced by the grey silhouette icon for them.

While some of us have had a moment of fun providing somewhat snarky answers, in all seriousness I think this question should be not just closed (as not a real question under the "rhetorical criterion") which I have already voted for, but deleted entirely.

Answer 1

tl;dr: If you accidentally put salad on your plate of leftovers before heating, and you had a magic microwave shield, wouldn't you just throw the shield on it? Why can't someone ask if this exists?

Full answer: I definitely disagree. Questions can be both valid and fun. Yes, there's an easy, obvious solution to the problem, but it's interesting (and sometimes even useful) to ask about alternate methods. What if you had something that wasn't so easy to just yank off the plate? In this case there aren't really very good alternate answers, but it's still worthwhile mentioning the reasons it's difficult to shield something in a microwave. That's really much less basic and obvious than a lot of other questions we're perfectly happy to have.

After thinking a little more, I think I've realized why I've had such a strong reaction to the attempts to not just close but delete this question. I honestly think the community's judgment has been unfair here. It's a specific, well-written (and fun) question, and we as a community should assume the best of our users (even if they came from another site), not treat it as a prank. Imagine what you'd do if one of our respected 10k users had asked it, instead of someone anonymous from another site. We should respect all our users.

The OP was curious (and said so in the comments) about whether there was a way to do this. They chose to ask the question in a lighthearted way, with a specific example, but still explicitly said what they were looking for. If it had been written in a completely dry form ("are there any food-safe materials I can use to partially or totally shield something in the microwave?") would anyone have had this reaction? The fact that the question is both clearly written and fun should be taken as a good thing, and the fact that we don't have a good answer doesn't mean there's something wrong with the question.

Answer 2

I voted to close it as off-topic.

It could indeed be an interesting question, after some editing. But it hasn't been edited—and remember closing is not permanent. Its not only acceptable but encouraged to edit your closed question to fix the problems, then ask for it to be re-opened. Closing is on the pathway to deletion, but only if the problems aren't fixed.

So, yes, OP could edit the question to ask, "How can I shield part of what I'm microwaving, to prevent it from cooking as much?" I'd not vote to close that, and were it closed, I'd vote to re-open. That's the kind of question a cook would know the answer to (if there is one).

Someone else could edit it—but we seem to be discouraging that kind of editing.

As it stands now, answers would have to talk about blocking microwaves, heat conduction, arcing, etc. (Because every cook would just not plate the salad until after heating the chicken—there is even a nice picture to show how silly it'd be for a cook to do it that way.) In fact, the answers do talk about things like that. That's not a question for a cook, it's a question for a physicist. But we already know physics.SE doesn't want it (and, if I remember correctly, migrating a question twice breaks things anyway).

Physics.SE decided not to have fun talking about weird microwave contraptions. But instead of doing something reasonable (closing as NARQ), they migrated it to us. One of their mods needs to be reminded to only migrate questions that'd be a good question on the target site.