Follow-up: Ice-cubes and marbles

[jack]

* 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.

Comments

[fanf]

Hmm, I was going to ask why weighted ice cubes would be an advantage, but then I remembered that water is densest at 4C, so if you want your drink to be colder than 4C all the way through, you want ice at the bottom of the glass as well as at the top. (You probably want ice at the top too, to cool down any liquid that's warmer than 4C.)

I wonder if alcohol significantly changes water's temperature/density curve.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

The original post (http://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/413293.html) had a big discussion whether they would be useful.

That's a good point (although I don't mind so much if the liquid is cold at the bottom if I'm drinking from the top). The original suggestion was so ice cubes aren't in your face.

In fact, I'm sure it would be useful in some situations, but more I just loved the solution out of proportion to the problem. Also, see the thing about the jug, having weighted ice-cubes in a jug would be useful.

[fanf]

Get a jug with an ice trap :-)

http://www.johnlewis.com/230196953/Product.aspx

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's another good idea :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Hm, that's an interesting thought. If I've googled correctly, water at 0c is about the same density as water at 8c. So if your initial water is cooler than that, it ought to sink below the freezing temp water at the bottom.

Unless the top is warmed by the air faster than the bottom is cooled by the ice (I suppose not -- surely heat is sucked into ice faster than into water from the air? But I don't know).

That's be as interesting thing to test, actually. My intuition is that the heat is conducted fairly evenly throughout. But if not, and you have enough ice throughout, might there be two stable states, one 0c throughout and one 0c at the bottom and >8c at the top? If so, might there be a cut-off in original uniform temperature that leads to one or the other? If so, that would be really interesting.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Do you have suggested measures for preventing the inebriated from choking on marbles?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Natural selection?

No, that's a valid objection. Maybe heavy smarties or similar? But I was sufficiently pleased to hope it wouldn't be a problem most of the time, and could avoid it when it might be.

[d37373.livejournal.com]

I must admit I haven't tried sheering (or in fact shearing) icecube trays, but I can't imagine it being better than bending. Sheer will produce pressure, and the only way is out, but the pressure is all at right angles to the direction you want the cubes to go.

If you bend the tray over backwards, only some of the forces will be acting on the ice (because the expansion of the top half will not pull the ice out), but there is a strong pressure differential between the bottom and top so the ice is forced up.

Plus, my hands are in the right place to give each individual cube a little push, allowing for a more controlled ejection if so desired.