Simple tools like this are not to be underestimated. This random egg boil time calculator is solely responsible for me having perfectly boiled eggs the past few years: https://www.omnicalculator.com/food/eggs
(the main three variables that dramatically alter boil time are soft vs hard boiled, starting temp [e.g. refrigerated vs room temp], and egg weight)
Neat, although it's buggy in Fahrenheit. It opens for me in Fahrenheit, maybe based on my browser's locale or geoip. The page opens with initial temperature 4; selecting fridge changes it to 4; selecting room temp changes it to 21. Those numbers make much more sense in Celsius! And indeed if I change the scale to Celsius, it uses those same numbers, now representing very different temperatures.
This makes a significant difference: with a US L egg at sea level, soft boil time is 8 minutes 27 seconds from the fridge in Fahrenheit, 6 minutes 58 seconds in Celsius. In my experience, the right answer is 6 minutes even, though opinions about runniness vary...
(Sending a note about this to feedback@omnicalculator.com)
edit: also, it says US L egg = 60 g? That's not right, unless maybe they're counting the shell, which they shouldn't. 50 g is about right and what cronometer.com says. cronometer also says 56 g = extra large, 63 g = jumbo.
Not sure if it's just me, but that calculator doesn't seem right given the formula it's supposed to be based off of. Someone else can check my work[0], but the only assumption I made was for K in the calculator (lambda in the linked paper). Since the paper[1] mentioned yolks were 1/3rd of an egg, I used a lambda value of 28.3
The number I got for a 60 gram egg starting at 4.4degC at sea level reaching soft-boiled temps was 5m17s. Compared to the website saying 6m58s. That's a pretty big error somewhere.
First time encountering WolframAlpha public web interface; a combination of programming language and LLM [1], if I understand correctly!?
> The Wolfram Language natural language processing functionality is a combination of rule-based and machine learning language models, including LLMs. It builds on top of advanced text mining and string manipulation capabilities and is integrated with a large visualization suite and extensive built-in linguistic data.
Also appreciate the question/prompt/command (!?) being encoded in the url.
FWIW, the base features of WolframAlpha significantly predates the present LLM craze, and there has not been any major leaps in its capabilities recently, apart from the addition of dedicated "LLM_xxx" functions.
I remember using it as a student back around 2010 and it worked the same then. Actually I think the free tier used to be better before they introduced the "pro" version with subscription fee.
(the main three variables that dramatically alter boil time are soft vs hard boiled, starting temp [e.g. refrigerated vs room temp], and egg weight)