iamkroot

You're right, I should have said equivalently :D

For a little while, yes. Ice has middling thermal conductivity, it'll eventually homogenously warm to the melting point.

Author here

Surface contact is one reason you want an ice/water slurry instead of just ice, but the real reason is that ice melting consume a lot more energy than just ice being warmed up to it's melting point.

The ice will quickly come up to it's melting (equilibrium!) point, without cooling the ice cream mixture very much. Remember, we're trying to freeze the ice cream (not just cool it down), which is proportionally just as thermodynamically expensive as melting ice. Bringing the ice up to it's melting point alone won't suck enough heat out of the ice cream mixture to freeze it.

The ice actually comes up to the temperature of the water while it's melting. That's what the equilibrium temperature is: the temperature of the entire ice / water system until it's been converted to all liquid or all solid.

Naturally there's some small local variations, but if you let the system come up to steady state, that's what will occur.

Delicious, of course!

And yes, the other commenter is correct. LNO2 works so well because it freezes the ice cream so fast that the crystals don't have time to grow very large, which produces a nice and smooth texture in the final product.

OP author here.

Yes, though you have to be careful. If you add too much alcohol you'll prevent your mixture from properly freezing.

David Leibowitz, author of "The Perfect Scoop" recommends no more than 45ml of 80 proof liquor per 1 liter of ice cream mixture.

Author here.

Hah, that's true, but I didn't want to mention it as it's not entirely in the aim of the essay :)

Author here, thank you!

It's been bouncing around in the back of my brain for a long time.

I couldn't find any clear and concise explanations about what really happens when salt is added to ice, so I did some research and wrote it out myself :D

I've always figured you could just do an auction.

Say you have 500 tickets. You give everyone who wants to go 48 hours to submit how much they're willing to pay for a ticket. At the end of the time period the 500 people whose bids were the highest all get the tickets.

You could publish the current price of the tickets during the bidding time frame and allow people to modify their bids at any point.

The final price would be whatever the 500th lowest bid was. In the event of a tie, choose randomly among the people tied for 500th.

I imagine this would be greeted with complaints about how it gives the rich an advantage, but I can't think of a fairer way to distribute tickets that also avoids the scalper problem.

You're really going to write an entire diatribe about how the image quality of new lenses is aesthetically inferior to old lenses and not include a single example comparison??

This is why I switched off of hard mode, after trying it a few times. For me while it was technically harder, it lost some strategic depth and the games became a lot less interesting.

Grazie!