Puddle Temperature Alarm

June 7th, 2022
cooking, ideas
I cook pancakes for my kids most mornings, and the griddle takes a little while to heat up. If you look around for articles on how to know when your pan is hot enough you'll see people suggest dropping in a little water and seeing how it behaves. The problem is, this requires you to be paying attention and guessing when it is about right to test. I'm trying to do a lot of different things in the morning, and don't want to allocate so much attention here. Instead, I put the water in at the beginning:

Once the pan heats up, the water starts to sizzle: the temperature is almost high enough:

The noise acts like an alarm, reminding me to stop unloading the dishwasher or whatever and continue with the pancakes.

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Information control, isolation, and ideological abuse

[I have freelanced for a number of effective altruist organizations, such as the Centre for Effective Altruism and 80,000 Hours.

via Thing of Things March 11, 2026

The Newest Technology in Frozen

There are lots of different things in Frozen that are new-ish, but my dad and I were wondering: what is the actual newest thing in Frozen? This led me to watch Frozen a lot while taking notes. Some of the things I found included: Elastic hair-ties A safety …

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts March 1, 2026

2025-26 New Year review

This is an annual post reviewing the last year and setting intentions for next year. I look over different life areas (work, health, parenting, effectiveness, etc) and analyze my life tracking data. Highlights include a minimal group house, the usefulness…

via Victoria Krakovna January 19, 2026

more     (via openring)