Putting a lid on the pot won't speed things along, as long as the water was boiling anyway. Boiling water is around 100 C, with or without lid.
Chopping them smaller make a bit of difference, but not that much - again most of the flesh will be at 100 C for the duration of the cooking. I've tried these things.
Water boils at 100C, but did you know that steam exists at temperature higher than waters boiling point? So steam above the water can go upto 120C depending on the weight of your lid. So when you put a lid on the pan you are semi boiling/ semi steaming which is why it cooks faster.
Actually, putting a lid on will give an incredible difference if you have a pressure cooker. You can heat up water to 120 degrees Celsius because of the pressure inside, and that should make those potatoes done faster.
Actually water starts to bubble around 70 C, and small bubbling vs heavy boiling makes a great difference in cooking time. But of course it doesn't matter whether you achieve this by turning up the heat or putting a lid on the pan.
Incidentally, just like when BBQ make sure you pierce the potato with a fork. Otherwise, yes you'll have cooked potato in <1 minute, however you'll still have to clean the microwave so it would be more like a time-shifting step rather than a time-saving step in the cooking process.
I feel like the average viewer is going to take this video at face value since they may not see the subtle reference to the Google Chrome speed tests video. Saying that you're faster than a cooked potato in hot water isn't saying much.
I do like the crack censorship though. It was funny and unexpected.
No. If you read the description of the chrome video, you'll see that they turned the LCD upside down to remove a shadow, and used software rotation in Windows to turn the display back around. The exact quote:
Chrome actually paints the page from top to bottom, but to eliminate a shadow from the driver board, we had to flip the monitor upside down and set the system preferences in Windows to rotate everything 180 degrees, resulting in the page appearing to render from bottom to top.
If windows has rotated everything, then chrome is now the right way round again and should appear to render properly.
The only reason it does that I can think of, is that chrome loaded when the screen was half way through a refresh - so we saw the now rendered bottom appear before it went back round and refreshed the top of the screen.
The point here is that the rotation is done by the OS, in software, so the screen is still painting from the physical left-to-right and top-to-bottom. This is something you'll never notice with the naked eye, but their camera uses a staggering 2700fps. This means that a full repaint of the screen - assuming 60Hz refresh happens in 45 frames. Those 45 frames, played back at 30 fps means that the full repaint takes a second and a half, leaving you with the ability to see the individual lines being (re)painted.
The display always paints from its own top to bottom. Since it has been turned upside down, when you watch really quickly, you can see it painting bottom-to-top from your point of view. This would be true whether the display has Windows rotation or not, and regardless of how apps are writing into the framebuffer.
Windows rotation makes the graphics driver output the framebuffer in reverse, so that the bottom lines of the image appear on the bottom lines of the display from your point of view. This makes the displayed image upright again.
To avoid flicker, Chrome may render offscreen and then copy the result top-to-bottom into the framebuffer. Hence Google's statement that Chrome renders top-to-bottom, and that the screen is displaying bottom-to-top due to rotation.
OK, I think that's enough pedantry for one comment ;)
Well, he does read a book called "Famous Herring Parties" while waiting for the potato to cook, and then proceed to simulate a sword fight with herrings.
I figured it was a Monty Python reference, to the part in Holy Grail where he systematically dismembers the black knight, and then faces the Knights Who Say Ni, who ask him to chop down the tallest tree in the forest with a herring.
