h a l f b a k e r y"This may be bollocks, but it's lovely bollocks."
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Given the apparent popularity of boiled eggs, it is a pity
that cooking them to perfection is such a difficult art to
master. This is especially true if you are one of those
people who like the yolk runny but the white firmly set.
Naturally, seismology provides the answer.
Geologists have
long used earthquakes to analyse the inner
composition of the Earth. Shock waves originating at the
epicentre propagate through the Earth, but their speed
depends on the solidity of what they are passing through.
By timing these shock waves, we have been able to deduce
a lot about the Earth's core.
The Egg Seismograph looks rather like a tiny pair of
headphones, which are placed on the egg before boiling.
One of the "earphones" contains a simple piezoelectric
transducer that can deliver a sharp but gentle tap to the
eggshell. The other "earphone" is a surface microphone
that can determine the arrival time of the shock wave.
Some simple computation by the machine's innards can
then report precisely the inner consistency of the egg.
[link]
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Excellent idea but unrealised potential. Make the piezo transducers higher power, and set up an ultrasonic standing wave inside the egg, you'd be able to cook the yolk while leaving the white runny. Yuck! |
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You should be able to test the egg's doneness up to perhaps 20 times
a second. Almost good enough for somebody who cares / has OCD. |
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The perfect egg to eat. That was attenuate! |
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......@......@...... @........ |
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<Bell in abandoned adobe church rings> |
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.......@.......@......... @.......@....... |
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.......@.......@........ @...... |
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I think the title of this Idea doesn't properly reflect its
content. You are talking about feedback-control, more
than timer-control. |
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Yes, but "Seismic egg degree of cookedness analyser"
got thrown out by Sales and Marketing. |
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Based on the cardioid shape of the sound-reflectance
profile, we were going to call it "Love Eggs", but our
initial panel of test-consumers felt the name was
misleading. |
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[+] and you should definitely be able to cook an egg by placing a little cap on its head; ready when the bell dings or the egg explodes. |
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[MaxwellBuchanan], perhaps an acronym might work?
Seismic
Analysis
Feedback
Egg
Boiled
Soft
--SAFEBS |
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Just a first possibility. Perhaps you can come up with
something more palatable. |
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One problem with the tiny-headphone method is it's limited to one egg. |
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How about fitting a rotating X-ray head around the circumference of the pan, which would feed, via some computer processing, a realtime 3D image of the contents of the pan onto an external monitor. You could make many perfect eggs at once. |
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I think all you'd see on the X-ray would be eggshells
and the pan. Maybe those terahertz thingies they
use at airports for looking through people's clothes? |
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Neutron beams are very good for that sort of relatively non-destructive testing. |
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No problem. Feed the chicken some zirconium-89 the day before it lays its egg. Then your rotating X-ray pan could perform a PET-CT scan. |
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hmm, could you measure the done-ness of an egg by its oscillations while spinning in boiling water? |
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There's more than enough noise, I think, in a pot of boiling water that adding a noisemaker should be unnecessary. It's possible with just a microphone and some clever math. Can we have a liquid nitrogen quench when the done-ness is perfect? |
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