A brief pause in this month’s special all-Tiki activity for some News You Can Use: Alcohol consumption can boost your creativity.

As my blog idol Instapundit says, “Is there nothing it can’t do?”

A new communication in the journal Consciousness and Cognition entitled “Uncorking the Muse: Alcohol Intoxication Facilitates Creative Problem Solving” relates to us the results of a new study at the University of Chicago that in creative problem solving tests, subjects intoxicated to just under the legal limit were more effective is completing the task than those who were sober.

I repeat, Liquid Creativity: Is there nothing booze can’t do?

Also, in the interests of full-disclosure and blowing my own horn, in the seventh grade, when I won a National Championship in creative problem solving, we were not using these performance-enhancing drugs….

H/T to my local FOX/ABC news affiliate: WTTE/WSYX

Here’s an interesting new study about our capacity to handle the effects of drink: You apparently can handle your liquor better in settings where you are used to drinking, than in unfamiliar settings, or even places where you don’t usually drink, says LiveScience in a profile of new research at the University of Birmingham and published in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism (via The Daily Mail, via HotAir).

First off, I want to stress that the tolerance for alcohol the researchers were measuring was not related to motor skills or reaction times. I.e. drinking in a familiar bar does not mean that you can drink more and still drive safely home.

The “tolerance” they cite is the ability to resist doing inappropriate things when drunk.

Like either one of these two….

Fortunately, the researchers did not expose their test subjects to contact with Snooki or He Who Is Paid NOT To Wear Abercrombie and Fitch. That would be creepy.

The actual tests were pretty benign. They measured whether subjects could resist selecting inappropriate responses in a battery of questions when drunk. If the subjects had not previously drunk alcohol in a place (even if they had drunk mocktails there), they were twice as likely to let certain inhibitions slip than in a place where they were used to drinking booze.

First off, kudos to Drs. Birak, Higgs, and Terry for coming up with the brilliant excuse for using University funds to take a bunch of undergrads on a series of pub crawls and see where they do the most stupid and embarrassing things….

Of course, they actually did no such thing, but it would have been awesome had they done so, yes? It also would have probably yielded more practical results, though less reproducible, alas. I just wrote the previous paragraph because it makes good copy. The results were actually quite limited, and not all the inhibition tests they performed produced results that support the effect.

That ends my reportage of the actual science, and let us begin the broad, sweeping generalizations of what we can take away from this if we accept the study’s conclusions in a general sense right off the bat.

Scientists hate it when the public just goes ahead and accepts a study right off and starts taking action on it because:

1. The results are initial, unsupported by other studies, and incompletely understood.
2. If everyone goes ahead and acts, there will be no need to fund additional studies on the subject.

“See that girl over there? I’ll bet the three of us could….”
The tragic effects of drinking too much in an unfamiliar bar.

First off, what might be the mechanism that accounts for this? I have read only the abstract, not the entire paper, but they seem to be leaning toward some sort of Pavlovian, behavioralist mechanism. My drinking instincts and experience aren’t really buying that. I have two, not necessarily competing theories.

The first is motivation. We tend to like places where we drink regularly. Sure, in this case, the drinkers didn’t choose to drink in a certain location repeatedly, but so what? I happen to really like the lobby bar of the Atlanta Airport Westin Hotel. Why on Earth? Because I’ve had a lot of drinks there over the years with family, friends, business rivals, and enemies. (In my family, the Venn diagram of those sets would be pretty much a single circle.) Many times, they were good times. But the location was chosen for me and the only reason I like it is because of the familiarity. Nevertheless, if I were to do something, um, uninhibited there, I might not be able to go back, either due to embarrassment or due to being barred. I wouldn’t like that, so I have added motivation in a familiar setting to behave myself. It could be as simple that a certain amount of booze disinhibits a drinker by, say, 30%. But if the familiarity of the setting increases his natural inhibitions by 30% to begin with….

I’ll employ a kind of techie metaphor for the second, even better idea I have. Let’s say that the brain has a certain (if prodigious) amount of bandwidth. We use that bandwidth all the time for lots of functions, such as look for threats, scan for hot members of the opposite (or indeed, our own) sex, figure what and how to eat, talk, keep in mind how to get to the toilet, talk to hot members of the opposite (or indeed, our own) sex, argue with the bartender about why he felt impelled to shake our damn Manhattan, figure out how to get our hands on the body of some selected hot member of the opposite (or indeed, our own) sex, and above all, for the purposes of this discussion, resist the temptation to actually just place our grubby mitts on said HMotO(oIOO)S, or even just blurt our intention or desire to do same.

Drinking narrows your bandwidth, full stop. Size, experience, etc. may reduce the narrowing, but all booze narrows everyone’s bandwidth.
However, in a familiar location, you know where the can is. You know who is likely to be a threat, or know there is likely to be none at all. You know that the bartender knows he better not shake your damn Manhattan.
You might think that you also would be comfortable being yourself and thus be less inhibited. But see Theory One above.
Instead, in most situations, I suggest that the brain saves on bandwidth by not worrying about such threats as bad guys, unknown bathrooms, and shaken Manhattans. It uses the bandwidth saved to try to maintain full function in its remaining tasks, such as keeping you from making an ass of yourself with that blonde paralegal.

Or…
successfully making an ass of yourself with her!

Unless you are married.
In which case you’d best be using all the inhibitions you got, Mister!

Gulp.
Of course, dear!

“I fail to see how any of this explains Cliff Clavin.”

It doesn’t, Norm. Science has no explanation for Cliffy. It does, however, pretty much explain you.

Few drinkers are unfamiliar with the sensation of looking down into one’s glass and wondering, “Where the heck did my drink go?” Bishop Blackie Ryan, the mystery-solving cleric created by Andrew Greeley, constantly complains that the leprechaun has gotten at his Irish whiskey.

Interestingly, the distilling industry also experiences this as well, at least those segments that age their product. As liquor sits in wooden barrels, while it is taking flavor from the wood, that same porous material is letting the alcohol in the casks evaporate. The amount lost is about roughly 2% per year. This can add up to quite a bit of ethanol, as we’ll see in a moment. The industry term for this missing booze is The Angel’s Share, a wonderfully lyrical term, if you ask me.

Maker’s Mark Lounge, where angels like to drink….

While most people note the amount of effect the Angel’s Share has on distillers’ bottom lines, a recent article in WIRED details how we are discovering that that errant booze affects the neighborhood as well. In The Mystery of the Canadian Whiskey Fungus, Wired tells us two things:

1. They don’t know how to spell whisky in proper context.
2. We’ve discovered what angels look like!

In Lakeshore, Ontario are the warehouses which hold vast arrays of barrels of Canadian Club, aging away. Humans may not get drunk by breathing the air in the neighborhood, but something does. Read the article for a fascinating story of these microscopic, black, barrel-shaped “angels”.

I wonder, now that we know what earthly angles look like, think you’ll see a move to change stained glass windows?

No, that is not one of the rather over the top hats from the royal wedding this weekend. It is instead the work of mulitmedia artist Marcos Lutyens. And what you are seeing in the picture is what that cocktail tastes like to her. More accurately, (I think) it reflects changes in her brain activity as measured by the headset she is wearing, when she sips a highly flavored cocktail.

I think the results are gorgeous. If you are in England, you could see a large, and I hope interactive, exhibit of this work at the FutureEverything festival in Manchester in mid-May. Absolut is sponsoring the exhibit, which I heartily approve of, since a future without booze is no future for me.

So if any of my UK readers attend this thing, I have some questions. First, there are huge variations in the pictures produced by this technique. (Excellent slideshow here.) What changes the image? Is it dependent on the flavors of the drink, the individual drinker, or existing level of intoxication? Are effects duplicateable? And when can I buy the cocktail book using these images instead of drink pix for illustrations?

(Via Gizmodo)

Source

Via the Twitter feed of Drunken Scientists, where I get all my science news, comes a story that merely confirms what I have believed for years: There is just nothing that cocktails cannot do!
After all, we know by now that drinks are good for the heart. Drinking causes weight loss. Red wine can improve your digestion. Drinking reduces the incidence of Type 2 Diabetes. Drinks may help stave off Alzheimer’s. Drinking and monogamy go together, too. Drinking can even improve the chances of public employees going above and beyond the call of duty. (This apparently does no apply to New York City and environs during snow emergencies….)

But this, my friends, is some serious stuff! Dr. Yoshihiko Takano in Japan believes he has discovered that alcohol can turn a certain substance, an alloy of iron and tellurium, into a room temperature superconductor. Not only that, but wine and spirits actually do a better job of this than pure alcohol. Best of all, he got the idea from a cocktail party he had!
Not only have cocktails given us room-temperature superconductors, they even gave us the idea of how to make said superconductors.

As I said, this is in fact serious stuff. If you aren’t familiar with the things practical room-temperature superconductors will one day let us do, it’s amazing stuff. Superconductors could give us vastly more efficient power generation. Perhaps more importantly, they could make power transmission lossless over great distances. This could transform wind power and certain solar generation avenues into actual, practical power solutions, instead of the pork- and graft-addled technologies they are today, absent such transmission capacity. And the things you can do with magnets and superconductors are straight out of science fiction…

Source
“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to have flying trains.”—Stuff Franklin Said, Third Edition

I don’t know if this actually is going to pan out or not. I hope it does. But we all should raise a glass to Dr. Takano for advancing the cause of science via the Ace Of Spades Lifestyle™!

Cheers!

As a final word, don’t take my light-hearted list of the health benefits of booze too heartily. I left the word “moderation” out, and it is (as with most things) the difference between Good For You and Bad For You. If you’d like to see the sheer volume of research that indicates alcohol helps our lives, try this gigantic web page. Bookmark the URL and send it to all your neo-prohibitionist acquaintances.

(Update: Welcome NotCoters! Please take a look around while you are here!)
OK, there is no single substance on Earth that more perfectly unites the cocktail geek and the science geek than ice. The deeper you get into cocktailia, the more obsessed you get with ice. Ice is both a tool and an ingredient for cocktails, so if you want to bring your A Game, you better have good ice in your kit. I would suggest to the ladies that discussing your fool-proof method for creating huge clear ice cubes at Tales of the Cocktail will attract swooning would-be boyfriends at the same rate as alluding to your Slave Leia metal bikini would at a Star Wars convention. (Guys over a certain age, that’s a good link.)
The cocktailosphere abounds with cool inks about ice, from Darcy’s classic series of posts, to Camper’s long running series on the search for clear ice, to Frederic’s recent examination of ice tools. But in a recent bout of web surfing brought about by an intense desire to procrastinate while up against a deadline, I’ve run into a bunch of cool examples of ice geekery out there in the world of science nerd-dom.
I’ll start with this video that most closely aligns with cocktailia, via Neatorama. Liquid Nitrogen is cold enough to actually freeze alcohol itself, and chef Ferran Adria whips up a batch of Caipirinha sorbet. He gets extra credit for the cool serving container, and the New York Public Library gets demerits for the crappy sound.

That Neatorama post has other cool videos about super cold things like a rocket engine that forms icicles while firing, how liquid oxygen makes charcoal lighter fluid look like a fire extinguisher, and how Antarctica has more ice than you really want.
Much more ice and super-cold geekery under the fold. (more…)

Science!

I’ve got a couple of little bits here relating to chemistry and drinking. They aren’t big enough to warrant posts on their own (I’m not currently that starved for content), so I hope that by putting them together, they can make it to school by themselves.

My wife used to work as a scientific research journal editor for the American Chemical Society, where one of her journals was the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. she called it, “the fun journal”, because the papers submitted would often include things like a really good recipe for pie (not often found in pubs like Chemical Research in Toxicology, thank goodness).

The current issue of “Ag and Food” presents us with a scientific explanation of why we avoid pairing red wine with fish.

Why do we need a study for this?
We don’t drink red wine with fish because it tastes bad.
How much federal money was spent on this study?

Easy, Guy. It was a Japanese study. And the point was to discover what is the chemical reaction that makes red wine taste bad with fish, or vice versa. The abstract is here.
It turns out that iron and/or ferrous ions, which are prevalent in red wines, are what trigger the fishy aftertaste. This is both interesting and potentially useful information. First, it shows us that this aversion is not just a matter of taste; i.e. we don’t avoid Cabernet with fish just because those snooty French said so. Second, not all red wines have a lot of iron in them, so perhaps in the future, diners and chefs can find new ways to employ low-iron red wines with fish. In addition, I could envision more industrial wine makers chelating out the iron from their reds and marketing them as “Fish-Safe”. I have no idea how much the iron affects the basic taste of reds, so whether this last would work, I dunno. But it’s fun nonetheless.
(H/T: Asylum)

Speaking of fun with chemistry, behold the Rotgutonix!

It looks like a pregnancy test.
You and Mr. Walker have some news for us?

You are going to stick your oar in the whole way through this post, aren’t you?
This little device is in fact a tiny laboratory. The idea is to carry it with you out on the town, stick it in your drink, and determine whether or not the bar is pouring the actual brand of liquor the label indicates, or some other brand.
I used to think that bars watering the booze, or pouring cheap vodka into premium bottles, was an urban legend. But a year or so ago, one of my former favorite hangouts, located in a very high-end restaurant, was busted for exactly this kind of switcheroo. The restaurant got off scott-free, as far as I heard, but all the bartenders (who weren’t the ones profiting) got fired. It does happen, and the more poseur the clientele of a bar, the more likely I imagine it is.

So let me get this straight.
You like to hang out in bars that serve a poseur clientele….

Shut up. It makes for great people watching.

Poseur!

So the Rotgutonix is actually a pretty cool idea. But the devil is in the details, unfortunately. First off, it is hardly inconspicuous. I think pulling this puppy out and dipping it for twenty seconds in your fresh drink right in front of the bartender who served it to you might be a bit “in your face” for me. Second, it only recognizes specific brands of liquor (Johnny Walker Red, JB, DYC, Pampero, Brugal, and Havana Club). I don’t even know some of these, and if you are going to test the Striding Man, how about at least the Black Label? The plan is for this device to eventually (it is still in testing) test twenty brands, but that is still pretty limited. Third, and most important, the Rotgutonix only can test pure spirit, mixed with nothing but water or ice. Plop it in your Martini or Daiquiri, and you’ll get a rotgut reading, no matter what liquor was used.
Still, I think they are definitely on to something with this idea, they just need to enhance the product.
(H/T: Oh Gizmo!)

Lastly, we come to an actual commercial product that works along the same lines as the Rotgutonix, but designed to help address a much more serious problem. It’s a lip gloss.

Really?
A lip gloss? The serious problem is chapped or dull-looking lips?
Who died and made you Tim Gunn?

Actually, it’s the accessory that comes with the lip gloss that I’m talking about. 2 Love My Lips Cosmetics also includes a little hand-held laboratory of sorts with its lip gloss. It’s a test device that checks for the presence of GHB or ketamine in a cocktail.
Right now, this date rape detector is only available in Great Britain, but it should find it’s way to the US and Australia soon. This product is a really good idea, and the general guidelines for safe clubbing and appropriate use of the tester to be found on the website are well-written and thought out. In fact, they are worth a read to the Cosmo guzzlers out there, even if you don’t want their product. The only thing I don’t understand is that you can only get the tester with the lip gloss. I would not be surprised to see little finger labs like this being marketed separately in the future.
I got this from Al Dente, which points out a few wrinkles that limit the full effectiveness of the tester. It doesn’t detect rohipnol. Further, certain fruit juices will throw off the results, as will some other stuff that shows up in bars. But to me the importance of having one of these around to use if things seem dodgy is simply this: It is an active, not a passive protection. The lady who has it in her purse will have it in the back of her mind. And that thought will lead to the situational awareness that is the best defense for women.
UPDATE: The Frisky has a link to a Daily Mail article surrounding the debate on how prevalent “date rape” drugs actually are. The Frisky has a really on point line I want to show, and take that as an opportunity to clarify what I said in the previous paragraph.

The problem with thinking roofies are more of a danger than they actually are is that it distracts women from far more prevalent dangers, like getting extremely wasted or walking home alone.

The Frisky blogger Amelia McDonell-Parry’s point, and the one I tried to make above, is that the real danger for many women is not so much roofies, as it is impaired judgment and/or control. I don’t know if I agree with her that the Daily Mail’s intent is to “victim blame” or not. While I am adamant that “date rape” is rape, and adding the modifier is in and of itself a means to exculpate the rapist to one extent or another, I do think that society has not just a right but a responsibility to hold young women at least somewhat responsibly for their own safety.
Anyway, the thing I liked about the guidelines from 2 Love My Lips is that they are almost entirely about personal responsibility and appropriate caution, and only a little bit about using the lab on a stick.

My snarky comments in my last post about scientific studies came back to me this afternoon, as I perused my iPhone at the park.
A week ago I read (and I bet a lot of you did too) an article in the New York Times, entitled Alcohol’s Good for You? Some Scientists Doubt It. The article addresses controversy over a recent discovered, but uncontested statistical fact: Moderate drinkers live longer than heavy drinkers, but they also live longer than Teetotalers.
If no one contests the fact, why is it controversial?
You don’t follow politics much, do you?
Here is what lots of scientists are saying to argue that the obvious advice that arises from this fact should not be given:

“The bottom line is there has not been a single study done on moderate alcohol consumption and mortality outcomes that is a ‘gold standard’ kind of study — the kind of randomized controlled clinical trial that we would be required to have in order to approve a new pharmaceutical agent in this country,” said Dr. Tim Naimi, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This a completely valid scientific point, but also a terrible basis for debate. How’s it both? Well, the central assertion that correlation is not causation is critical to good science. And that critical rule is the most often ignored best practice in science, by both lay people and scientists themselves. So it certainly is reasonable to say that you should not take this statistical fact alone as advising moderate drinking.
But there are numerous other studies that show more direct causation between alcohol consumption and a variety of specific health benefits and risks. How do we balance them? Dr. Naimi’s suggestion that we employ a process similar to the FDA’s approval process for new drugs is flawed for various reasons. First, as the article notes, the only sponsor for such a test that might allow the results to be trusted by both sides would be the Feds. And they won’t pay for such a process because whichever side comes out behind will hate them. Further, I would suggest that using a process that would reject Aspirin or Penicillin as possessing too many risk factors to be allowed, would certainly find against alcohol. Which is more an indictment of the government’s process of approving drugs than it is of alcohol. The fact is, like everything else on Earth, alcohol has benefits and risks. If we want to know how those sides tend to balance, I’d suggest that we have a study already done, to the goldest of standards, about how those risks tend to balance. The sample size is humanity….
To be fair, the argument Dr. Naimi and some others (don’t you just love when reporters use the phrase some scientists say…?) make against my last point is this:

…the two groups are so different that they simply cannot be compared. Moderate drinkers are healthier, wealthier and more educated, and they get better health care, even though they are more likely to smoke. They are even more likely to have all of their teeth, a marker of well-being.

The problem I see with this distinction is that the scientists seem determined to believe that these sociological differences could have no causative relationship with alcohol consumption. This is of course ridiculous. No one claims that alcohol use can and does change people’s life circumstances, at least in the case of heavy use or abuse. Why should we reject out of hand the notion that moderate alcohol use might actually promote some of those social advantages the researchers say distinguish moderate drinkers?
I’m not saying this is certain, but I contend that the differences they are discussing can’t legitimately be used as control factors since income and education may also be affected by alcohol use. In fact, a Forbes article by Arthur Brooks cites a study that purports to show such a relationship.

Moderate drinkers are richer than teetotalers, too. In 2001 the University of Michigan’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics found that light drinkers (one to two drinks a day) had a mean income of $49,000, versus $36,000 among teetotalers. This is a nuanced statistic; drinking may be associated with other variables (like education) that influence income. So the researchers did their best to strip these other causes out. If two adults were identical with respect to education, age, family status, race and religion, except that the first had one or two drinks each night after work while the second was a teetotaler, the drinker would tend to enjoy a “drinker’s bonus” of about 10% higher income.

Is this correlation or causation? Again, who knows? Especially since in this area we are leaving medical science and entering sociology. And sociology ain’t science, guys. Sorry, but it isn’t.
Finally, another article in Forbes (the one I was reading in the park while my kids played on the swings) makes a logical argument that in many ways trumps the entire debate. The article, by Jeff Stier is entitled I Choose Risk. And no, the fact that the term bikini waxing is found in the subtitle is not why I was reading it. Stier’s article is a general condemnation of how we are becoming increasingly, riskily, adverse to… well… risk.
Most of his article is devoted to the fish pedicures, video games, and the aforementioned bikini waxing, but he ends with linking the Brooks article and saying this about the correlation/causation question.

I believe that moderate drinkers have the ability to accept risk (unlike teetotalers) and manage it (as opposed to alcoholics). This is a discipline that they can deploy both at the bar and at the office. The ability to engage judiciously with risk in all facets of life may be a predictor of success–whether it’s part of a career, daily routine or society in general.

So let’s wrap up this rambling post. It is a fact that moderate drinkers happen to live longer than those who drink more or less. There are specific, well established health benefits from alcohol consumption, with more being found all the time. The are specific risks associated with alcohol use as well. In addition to living longer, moderate drinkers make more money, are healthier, and are better educated. Moderate drinking is a skill, employing talents that are valuable for success in all walks of life. And I’ll add that drinking is enjoyable and can improve our quality of life.

I’ll close with a famous quote by Benjamin Franklin that apparently was not quite what is usually reported:

Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.

Via my favorite Guy Oriented Website You (probably) Won’t Get Busted For Browsing, Asylum.com, comes an article from the Telegraph. It proves once again that Britain is the land of interesting alcohol research. (All booze studies in the US come to either or usually both of the following conclusions: Alcohol is the Debbil, or We were unable to prove that alcohol is the Debbil, so we need more funding study to get the goods on it.) The valuable information recovered from this study is: Alcohol goes to the head in six minutes.
Here are the money grafs:

Scientists set out to test the well-known saying that just one drink can quickly go to your head.
Only six minutes after consuming an amount of alcohol equivalent to three glasses of beer or two glasses of wine, leading to a blood alcohol level of 0.05 to 0.06 percent, changes had already taken place in brain cells.

I’ll leave it to you to spot all the peripheral silliness in these two one sentence paragraphs. To me the big question I popped from this was, drinking three beers through a straw while lying on your back in an MRI only leads to a 0.05 BAC?!?!?
Really?
I can think of only three explanations for this:

1. Brits drink really low alcohol beer. Verdict: Not bloody likely.
2. Brits have a different metabolic process from Americans. Verdict: Even less likely.
3. Brits drink small beers. Verdict: Ummm, I dunno.
4. MRI machines inhibit drunkenness. Verdict: Who cares?

Any readers from across the Pond want to help me out on this?

Image does not depict BAC of 0.05.

Anyway, I am aware that the actual study probably was aimed at those chemical changes in the brain, not how fast you get your buzz on, but the scientists’ PR people clearly know how to craft a press release to attract the attention of newspapers (and your humble blogger, apparently).
But what are we to take from this information? What can we do with it? I’m not sure. But the first fact I can think of is that when you slam a shot of tequila or chilled vodka, the wobbly feeling you get instantly is not intoxication, it’s just shock to your tissues. Also, while there is a delay between intake and effect, it’s probably not long enough to accomplish anything useful, so don’t try.
When you combine this the first rule of cocktail wisdom, A cocktail should be drunk quickly, while it is still laughing at you, I think it means you need to wait a while between drinks if you want any meaningful gauge of where you are, drunkenness-wise. Beyond that, does anyone else have a use for this, beyond being a basis for a cool James Bond scene?

Reese, over at Cocktail Hacker, has a post that I’m going to steal more of than I should, including the picture above, just because it is so cool. He does a small experiment about shaking versus stirring, and gives us the split image picture above, with a shaken Martini on the left and stirred on the right. Reese seems to start his experiment concerned mostly with the aesthetics of the result. I want you to read his post too, so I’ll leave that alone except to say that I actually find that I like my Martinis looking as if you could peer closely and see Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio clinging to a piece of flotsam amidst the ice flakes.
I’m more concerned about the bit of science Reese uncovers. His cocktail shaken for 30 seconds came out into the glass at 26 degrees. Stirred a like time, it poured at 46 degrees! When he stirred for 60 seconds, the temp managed to get down to 32. He also noticed, as you can see above, that there was a larger volume in the shaken cocktail, than in the 30 second stir. The 60 second stir almost had the volume of the shaken. Got all that? No? Too bad. I’m not going through that again. Pay attention.
The scientific principal that matters here is that the colder you want your drink, the more diluted it has to be.
Why? Two years ago, Darcy O’Neil wrote a post that pointed out the science behind this. Here is the key fact: Almost all the chill you get from ice in a drink comes from the act of melting itself. A liquid is cooled when you put ice (or even very cold water) in it because the heat energy in the warm ingredients is bled off to raise the temperature of the ice. The cool thing about water is, it takes a fairly small amount of energy to warm up ice or water. But it takes a honking big amount to change ice into water. Here’s a cool graph that shows you it takes almost 80% as much heat to melt ice (which does not raise it’s temp at all) as it does to heat it from 32 degrees to the boiling point!

Why is shaking faster than stirring? Vigorous agitation cracks and slivers the ice, which increases it’s surface area. This makes the heat transfer go faster. It also leaves air bubbles and lots and lots of little needles of ice. These little slivers will go right through the strainer, clouding the drink, along with the bubbles. And these slivers won’t melt very quickly, despite their large surface to mass ratio, because your drink is now below their melting point! Incidentally, if you don’t drink your cocktail quickly (while it is still laughing at you) these little slivers will melt, and retard the warming speed slightly.
But as the ice melts, it dilutes the drink as well. Some water is needed in most cocktails to make them taste right, but too much and you will have a bland or thin-tasting drink. This is ironic, because the colder the drink, the stronger we can take it, and in fact like it.

And here is where we move from the physics of ice to the sometimes amazing nexus of art and industrial engineering that is modern cocktail bartending.
First, the art. Do you shake or stir? How long? How hard? There aren’t really objective, scientific rules for any of this. You may have a preference so dogmatic and iron-clad that for you it is akin to the Third Law of Thermodynamics, but Pete down the bar there may have an equally strong preference the other way. Chances are, unless you are Gary Regan and want to spend a half-hour instructing an airport bartender how to make a Manhattan, your bartender will decide to shake or stir, and for how long. In this, he or she is an artist. There are many ways to arrive at a great drink with the same ingredients, and many more ways to end up with a crude paint by numbers sketch.
If the bartender is you, in your Basement Bar, you can take the time to be as loving and careful as you like, limited only by your thirst, and that of your guests. But in a crowded commercial establishment, the industrial engineering aspect comes into play. If you ask for a Plymouth Martini, stirred, how likely are you to get Reese’s 32 degree job in any bar, anywhere?
Really?
No, not even there.
A bartender who takes sixty seconds to lovingly, gently stir each Martini will be in the weeds so quickly, that his boss will need a DR Trimmer/Mower and/or a price hike to get him out.
So, if you find yourself served a cocktail that looks great, tastes great, is very cold, served quickly, and for an at least somewhat reasonable price, look hard at your bartender. He or she deserves a good reward for their skill and labor. And you need to remember them so you can come back again.