You Know You're a Nerd When...

Well, I'm sitting here about to eat some spaghetti. Why do I feel the need to tell you this, you ask?

OK, fine, if you really need to know.

I decided to make spaghetti for dinner tonight. I'm afraid that I decide that a lot of nights these days, so that certainly isn't very interesting, or nerdy. But anyway, the first thing you do when you make pasta is boil some water. I'm cooking on gas these days, as I believe I've mentioned before, which is supposed to be faster, but I never noticed the water to boil especially fast. Today, however, I forgot to cover the pot. I stepped away for a few minutes and came back to find the water bubbling already. I thought this odd, as conventional wisdom dictates that you should cover a pot to make it boil faster. I guess noticing that it boiled faster is a little nerdy, but here's the kicker. I thought about it for a second and realized that the lid is pretty heavy and I know that it might just be able to keep the pressure inside the pot higher, raising the boiling temperature of the water and maybe taking longer for it to boil. I even asked my roommate, who is a current chemistry major (I graduated long ago with a chem major). He thought about it as well. Neither of us could decide whether or not this was actually possible.

I rather doubt it, but the experimental evidence seems to say otherwise. What do you think?