Follow-up: Ice-cubes and marbles
Feb. 15th, 2008 01:15 am* The marble saga ended as Ian handed me marbles in the carlton
* Most people had no idea of the connection between the marbles-in-ice-cubes idea and the marbles wandering round looking for me. So it must have seemed a whole order of magnitude weirder to them than to me :)
* There seemed to be a final cosmic twist, I got home, and the marbles were gone! If they'd fallen out of my jacker pocket, I thought that was my cue to call a tragic ending and wrap up the saga. However, no, I'd just moved them to the table when I got home, (in case I forgot they were there, cycled off tomorrow, and they fell out of my jacket pocket).
* I thought of a use for marble-weighted ice-cubes while filling a jug generously with vanilla ice-cubes. In a jug (typo: guy) there's often a bell-shape which lets you pour while keeping anything heavy in the bottom, and you want many ice-cubes to keep that mass of water cold, and they really do have a tendency to escape into a glass if they float.
* When filling the ice-cube tray with marbles (half-metalic, half-coloured-glass) each notch is almost exactly the width and twice the length of a marble, giving them a pleasing binary switch "roll to either end" configuration.
* Getting ice cubes out of a tray, I was used to twisting, and it only now occured to me to apply sheer. Parallelagramising the tray (and hence holes) a bit has to make the ice pop out, whereas twisting just loosens it against the sides.
* Most people had no idea of the connection between the marbles-in-ice-cubes idea and the marbles wandering round looking for me. So it must have seemed a whole order of magnitude weirder to them than to me :)
* There seemed to be a final cosmic twist, I got home, and the marbles were gone! If they'd fallen out of my jacker pocket, I thought that was my cue to call a tragic ending and wrap up the saga. However, no, I'd just moved them to the table when I got home, (in case I forgot they were there, cycled off tomorrow, and they fell out of my jacket pocket).
* I thought of a use for marble-weighted ice-cubes while filling a jug generously with vanilla ice-cubes. In a jug (typo: guy) there's often a bell-shape which lets you pour while keeping anything heavy in the bottom, and you want many ice-cubes to keep that mass of water cold, and they really do have a tendency to escape into a glass if they float.
* When filling the ice-cube tray with marbles (half-metalic, half-coloured-glass) each notch is almost exactly the width and twice the length of a marble, giving them a pleasing binary switch "roll to either end" configuration.
* Getting ice cubes out of a tray, I was used to twisting, and it only now occured to me to apply sheer. Parallelagramising the tray (and hence holes) a bit has to make the ice pop out, whereas twisting just loosens it against the sides.