What a wonderful piece. Brave, thoughtful, funny. One of the things I most enjoy about my gender-nonconforming friends is how they can make some causal, offhand observation about how people act that will crack my head open. All my life, I'll have just taken some aspect of a socially constructed gender binary as The Truth. And they'll point out something that is at this point utterly mundane to them because they've seen it from multiple perspectives. Often something that they'd rather not even deal with, but everybody keeps pushing on them.
Thanks for posting it.
(And also, I am darkly pleased to find out that club is even more awful than I expected. The "stylized power ritual" paragraph is perfect.)
I took a totally different message away from the story. It was a story -- one you don't often hear -- of someone who discovered their trans tendency was a result/coping mechanism borne of early trauma.
I don't think the club sounded any more/less douchey than a place like HN (the owner notwithstanding). It sounds like a place where a certain group of people complain about the issues that affect them. Like all specialized groups, their complaints sound ridiculous to non-members. For comparison, consider this complaint: "We just can't afford a house in Palo Alto, all we can spend is $800k and anything halfway decent is at least $2MM" -- that conversation probably happens 100x daily in the Bay, but it sounds ridiculous and hopelessly disconnected from reality to anyone not living here. Perspective.
I'm not sure if the message you took from the story was intended, but you do raise an interesting point.
Because of a number of reasons I've always spent a lot of time around people who struggled with their gender/sexuality in society, and there were more than a few individuals, mostly gay men, where I strongly suspected that they were gay, at least in part, by choice.
Now just to be clear: I think it can be dangerous, damaging, offensive and ultimately pointless to make such a judgment, but as a (private) observation it fascinated to me.
(On the other hand, I've also met a number straight men of whom I suspected that they could be comfortable gay or bisexual, but 'chose' the more orthodox, straight identity.)
To reinforce your point about HN being not so different than the club, especially in context of the author's observations about men spending their time condescending to one another: fully 1/3 of the replies to this very well-written piece are dedicated to a subthread filled with HNers condescending to one another about their scientific knowledge of ice.
> I don't think the club sounded any more/less douchey than a place like HN (the owner notwithstanding).
I think it sounded a lot worse, but maybe I'm blinded by my contempt for people who think spending $2000 on a jacket is somehow a good idea.
But using HN as a benchmark is not so great. I participate because high-tech entrepreneurs are my people, but there are plenty of good folks who hold HN in contempt for the stuff that gets said here. It has improved some in the last year or so with better moderation, but I just expect 50% or so of my interactions here will be awful. In contrast to say, Quora, where it's 5% awful, or well-moderated mailing lists, which are under 1%.
I don't know about the rest, but the physics behind the ice ball does not seem right to me. The ice absorbs heat from the drink and cools it. The ice melts at a rate governed by how fast it absorbs the heat.
If the ice melts more slowly, it absorbs less heat, so it cools the drink less. You can get the ice to melt more slowly by reducing its surface area, but your drink will also be warmer.
I'm going to take a stab at this, but trust me I don't speak from a position of authority on this one, just a couple of good college-level chemistry classes.
So water will transition from liquid to solid and back through a phase change which consumes or produces energy. So any melting will cool the drink assuming it's warmer than 0 degrees C.
So let's take as our starting point a mass of ice uniformly 0 degrees C. Regardless of geometry, any cooling of whisky will inevitably produce a phase change to liquid water in the exact amount required by the energy absorbed by the ice. So you get 0 degree ice, 0 degree water, and cooler whiskey. Assuming a 0 degree ice ball geometry is irrelevant.
Of course water can be cooler than 0! So let's assume some really cool ice and do some thought experiment geometries. Take super thin sheets of ice for example. The total amount of energy available to cool the drink without melting is the specific heat of the ice times the temperature difference from zero (there might be some non-linearity here but I doubt it's relevant) times the volume of the ice. So if you have enough volume and cold enough ice you should be able to achieve a 0 degree drink at which point you have no more cooling and therefore no melting and no water.
Unless the heat is transferred out of the water unevenly, say a large mass of it with a central core inaccessible from the outside liquid. Then it would matter how fast heat travels from the interface to the core relative to how fast heat travels from the drink to the interface. This probably has something to do with the outside liquid being turbulent and the inside solid being a lattice but I'm not sure.
So, pure speculation here, I'd guess a large ball would have smaller surface to volume and so would cool more slowly for equivalent volume, but you get a large volume so you might be okay assuming the cold core of the large ice ball does the job of cooling the surface faster than the drink can heat it up.
It seems to be it would be more effective to get very small ice chunks, a ton of them, make them really cold, then you have lots of surface area and if you do the math you could approximately guarantee no melting and you'd cool fast. Then strain out the chunks and put whatever you want in there since it's already 0 (maybe something cool looking you can condescend about?)
But whatever you do don't put it in a glass you grab with your whole hand, the air is a really good insulator, glass much less so and palms work like a circulating hot-fluid heat exchanger.
I'll take another stab with some thermo education experience added in. Much of your stab is pretty accurate though.
Starting off with the opposite, I'll compare two situations. One with whiskey and snow, the other with whiskey and an ice ball. (mass of snow = mass of ice ball)
Immediately when you drop the snow in, the temperature of the solid water in the snow raises from some negative temperature to 0 C, the temperature of the whiskey lowers to 0 C, and the surface of the snow particles melts. The slurry stays in equilibrium at 0 C until external heat inputs melt all of the solid water.
Also because it is at 0 C, heat transfers from the environment quickly (heat transfer rate depends on the difference in temperature, the bigger the difference the more energy is transferred in the same amount of time)
Downsides:
* Cold whiskey
* Immediately diluted whiskey
* Faster heat transfer.
Now for a solid ball of ice. As opposed to the snow, there isn't an instant change to a constant temperature. The ice (which in my freezer is at -19 C) initially only warms towards 0, there isn't a significant amount of melt until the whole ball is at 0 C. The whiskey likewise don't instantly, or perhaps ever cool to 0 C. This warmer whiskey accepts energy from the environment less quickly, which warms the ice ball less quickly, which results delayed and slower ice melt.
This all happens because the surface area in contact with the fluid is much much smaller than with the snow.
So you get
* warmer whiskey (desirable for more flavor)
* less water immediately in the whiskey
* slower introduction of water into the whiskey
This is all because the large mass, low surface ice ball slows down the thermodynamic process which has all desirable effects. * The key is not cooling the whiskey as quickly & not keeping the whiskey at 0 C. If it _did_ keep the whiskey at 0 C (for example with lots of stirring) there wouldn't be a difference between snow and ice ball.
Normal ice cubes are a middle ground with undesirable effects to a lesser degree.
Ah this is interesting for a teetotaler! I did not know it was desirable to keep the whiskey warm. I thought, like soft drinks, the idea was to keep it as chilled as possible. So the optimum temp is just a little below room?
Lots of character (flavor) is lost with many foods when they are very cold. Cooler whiskey goes down smooth, 0 C whiskey has lost most of it's flavor (especially if you're the kind of person who spends obscene amounts of money on small amounts of whiskey).
Room temperature on a cool day is what many will say is the 'right' temperature, but there is no right or wrong, despite what many questionable experts will tell you.
Nobody is going to agree that X is the best temperature for every whiskey. Whiskies and drinkers are all different. Room temperature whiskey and ice give the most control with the least complication.
Quoting from bartender Jeffrey Morgenthaler's recent book:
> My experience using these has resulted in more than a few cracked ice balls, whose deep fissures essentially increase the surface area of the ice ball, negating any benefits in that department.
I had pretty much the same experience with my molds (I was using the Tovolo brand, rather than the one you linked to, though).
I haven't used one myself to confirm the quality, but Cocktail Kingdom (which comes highly recommended + I know from experience sells great bar products) has them for $150 for 55mm models and $300 for 70mm models.
I believe that getting the ice to melt more slowly is the purpose. Regular ice cubes will melt at a faster rate and in turn dilute whichever drink you have them in. In something like water or soda it is less noticeable but with something like whisky, you will end up noticing it more.
Care to explain? This seems counterintuitive and interesting and I can't seem to find a source or equation that relates to your latter statement online.
I think there are bad parts of both genders- would this story be much different if it was a trans woman working in a female super upscale department store, and coming to the same conclusion, but that she'd rather stay a man?
I think the difference is that it would be less interesting to me.
What I like about this article is that it's (for me) a rare case of an article that doesn't highlight the advantages of being a man, or the disadvantages of being a woman.
Am I the only one that thinks this is kind of surprising? I was taught that transgenderness wasn't something you could choose, but apparently this woman can and did choose her gender. She didn't "deep down feel like a man" but still was identified with gender identification disorder.
There are multiple possible answers. The simplest being, that she was originally mistaken in her interpretation of her depression.
It doesn't strike me like the author chose to be a man or stay a women like how the rest of us chooses between vanilla and chocolate ice-cream. It was a profound realization that where she was going in life would not make her happier, only more sad.
Another explanation is that she identifies 50% male and 50% female and both are equally right or wrong for her. But she still needs to choose to be either or.
As a general practice, reparative therapy has historically been very harmful, and is usually what people are advocating for when they say that being transgender is something you "can choose".
There exist some people for whom transition is optimal for mental health and some people for which it is not.
"Transition" can also be deconstructed into different things:
- hormone therapy (which itself involves a lot of different possibilities)
- changes in gendered behavior (voice, body language, etc.)
- changes in gendered apparel
- changes in gendered self-perception
- asking to go by different pronouns
- becoming a part of trans-aware/queer communities where gender is perceived as more fluid
That was strangely moving and beautiful. Normally I'd have abandoned such a piece early as an overly dramatic representation of one person's demons - and I've got plenty of other people's demons on my mind already. This author was different. I think it was the pace with which she revealed her situation and the process that brought her to where she is today - deliberate and very careful.
At that point, is it a sexist microagression anymore?
Further, what if the mansplainer's friends don't mind being "mansplained" to? At what point do accusations of mansplaining simply become nasty ridicule of those who take joy in knowledge of the world around them?
That wasn't about joy in knowledge. He interrupted her to expound about a book he hadn't even read, while energetically ignoring explicit statements that she not only the author of a book on the same topic, but the author of the very book he was mansplaining about. And then, when he finally realized that an expert on the topic was in front of him, he still wouldn't shut up.
I know a lot of smart people who take joy in knowledge. Who take joy in sharing knowledge. But every one of them can also shut up and listen.
Ice is a poor conductor of heat. This means that thermal energy of the liquid medium will be exchanged between the ice near the surface of the ice body/bodies. Thus, the rate at which the ice accepts energy from the alcohol is determined by the surface area of the bodies of ice. A single sphere of ice produces the lowest possible surface area. On a graph of drink temperature vs time, crushed ice (highest surface area) would produce a large dip and then level out. The orb would create a broad valley of lower temperature, though never as cold as the crushed ice.
I'm sure I'm not alone in finding this piece incredibly obnoxious. Complaining about folks being judgmental and condescending while yourself being judgmental and condescending isn't profound.
Entertaining, but I feel sorry for her/him for having such a misguided impression of the world. Generalizing about men from the experience in a silly club is just wrong.
Also, if she wants to see condescending women, she should go to a meeting of mothers comparing the progress of their kids. Although as a trans she'll probably be spared.
Entertainingly, the author uses "condescending about ice balls" as a symbol of all things she hates about the testosterone-driven world. In the comments here: people arguing about ice-ball physics. Metaphor complete!
Wouldn't it be ironic if the people arguing about ice-ball physics were doing so simply because they enjoyed the mildly entertaining physics problem, while the people attributing the ice-ball arguments to a need for condescension were only doing so because they themselves needed a mechanism to condescend towards the people arguing about ice-ball physics?
Wouldn't it be even more ironic of both groups of people discussed ice balls because they mildly enjoyed the physics problem, and the perception of condensation was one entirely fabricated in the mind of some more sensitive observers?
That the ice ball thread is the longest on this submission is kind of funny, but its HN so thats fine. At least its not the highest voted one, so theres still hope.
I guess I shouldn't have posted that, I was just a bit disappointed that discussing the details of ice ball physics was the most active thread, completely missing or ignoring the point of this text, and validating the stereotype.
Guess I was hoping that for once, the technical stuff wouldn't dominate, that occasionally there is a place for more intimate and emotional writing, something more... human. But this is HN, so its ok and I should shut up, and instead be the change I want to see in the world and all. Sorry for the pointless rant.
Or you could try to explain what you mean? What was the point of the text in your opinion, and what is the stereotype being validated by discussing ice balls?
In what sense is discussing ice-ball physics condescending? I would consider it amusing. I don't think people are "educating" others about ice ball physics to show their superior physics knowledge.
Also, ironically, the whole article was very condescending - he/she is condescending about other people being condescending.
Thanks for posting it.
(And also, I am darkly pleased to find out that club is even more awful than I expected. The "stylized power ritual" paragraph is perfect.)