jack: (Default)
* 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.
jack: (Default)
* Coke icecubes don't sink
* Saturated sugar icecubes *do*, however, although (a) I wouldn't swear to anything regarding their enthalpy and (b) they look very weird.
* In fact, in all honesty, the best solution for "ice cubes attacking your nose" is just to only use one or two, and everything's fine. That would only actually fail if you want to leave it standing a long time.
* However, I think the marble thing is very cool, so want to try it out of all proportion to the extent that it solves the issues I described[Dagger].

ETA: http://www.flashingblinkylights.com/lightup-products-lighted-cubes-c-114_77.html is an example of the other suggestion, that light-up cubes can probably be made to sink, or even be neutrally buoyant.