No, mostly
You mostly can't boil water by spinning the glass. "Mostly" because some weird stuff is possible under extreme conditions like in a rotary evaporator; in such cases, whether or not there's "boiling" starts to become an issue of semantics.
That explanation of aerodynamic lift is a co...
I'm not an expert so I could be wrong but I think you're not accurate. The common misconception debunked on Wikipedia is specifically the "equal transit time", the idea that the air below and above the wing rejoins after passing it. The OP said no such thing, he only said the air above is faster than the air below, which is true (even moreso than ETT predicts), and that this is related to the difference in pressure, which is also true (by Bernoulli's principle).
@MeniRosenfeld You're right that I was off about the misconception being the one discussed in Wikipedia. I'm having trouble figuring out how to express the misconception that I'd like to address. Gonna try to find a better reference.
Okay, so trying to find a decent explanation about what's wrong with the airflow-causes-pressure-causes-lift explanation that invokes Bernoulli's principle. It's weird to explain away because the underlying premises, such as the air speed and that a balance of pressures would cause a net reaction, aren't wrong. The mistake's in the assertion that they're the cause of lift. This may sound overly pedantic, but stuff like pressure and Bernoulli's law are fundamentally equilibrium-based concepts; they're out-of-scope in a dynamic system like this. [...]
"Doug McLean | Common Misconceptions in Aerodynamics", via Michigan Engineering on YouTube, has some speaker talking a bit about the problems in Bernoulli's principle, in particular its issues with causality. He doesn't seem to demonstrate a practical reason why this view doesn't work; he merely points out that it's incorrect. Well, until at 46:52, where he points out the pressure profiles on the ground, but it takes a bit of explanation to get from the causation problem to the pressure profiles.
Apparently the idea that Bernoulli's principle causes lift follows from simplified potential flow theory. Wikipedia notes, "Richard Feynman considered potential flow to be so unphysical that the only fluid to obey the assumptions was "dry water" (quoting John von Neumann)." I'll have to update the answer later once I figure out how to better express this misconception.
I'd contend that by stirring so fast that you create a vortex, you actually increase the boiling point -- because you essentially have a centrifuge which increases the pressure on the water. It may look like a tornado, and the air in the middle void may circle like in a tornado, but by all means it is not. A tornado is a violent updraft creating a local low-pressure zone; because of shear winds, Coriolis forces and/or other instabilities a vortex forms. The vortex is the result of a pressure differential, not a cause.
@PeterA.Schneider You can get a vortex by spinning a glass of water around. This is one of those things that you can confirm pretty easily if you've got a beverage in front of you right now. But, yup, you're right that the pressure would go up at the boundaries. The lower pressure discussed in the answer's inside the vortex, under rather extreme rotation.
The equal-transit-time misconception is only part of the issue here. The problem comes from getting the cause and effect in Bernoulli's equations backwards; it's the pressure gradient that causes the change in flow speed, not the other way around. The pressure gradient is caused by the change in cross-section of the flow as the cross-sectional area of the wing changes, leaving the remaining space to be filled by air that was previously occupying a smaller space.
The lower pressure inside the tornado is relative to the higher pressure outside the tornado. For real tornados, the pressure is dictated from outside, because that is where the "normal" atmosphere is. Thus you have a pressure decrease towards the inside. For spinning water in a glass, the pressure is dictated from inside, because that is where the "normal" atmosphere is in this case. Thus you have a pressure increase towards the outside.
@Robin You're working under the reasonable assumption that atmospheric pressure's an unbreakable boundary condition. For most practical intents and assumptions about the question's background conditions, this is a pretty good assumption, but it's not the only possibility (example in the comments below your answer). Kinda why I went with "No" but qualified it with "mostly", since it's not strictly impossible - just takes some extreme doing.
@PhilFrost It's interesting that people regularly use the "planes fly upside down" answer with this since it's highly irregular for planes to be seen flying upside down. Most planes can't, at least not for long. Some planes have symmetrical air-foils that allow for sustained inverted flight.
One more argument: To decrease pressure inside the vortex, air must get out somehow. For a closed system, this is obvious nonsense because there's no place the air can go to. For an open system: What external effect sucks the air out if there is a normal atmosphere at the opening? And it must be external, because otherwise the outside air just gets sucked in by the lower pressure. Or what is preventing the outside air from just filling the partial vacuum?
@JimmyJames, However, the fact that a plane with symmetric airfoil wings can fly still contradicts the "faster moving air over the top surface creates lift" explanation of lift.
I wouldn't say the spinning in a rotovap is particularly related to this question. The spinning is just to make sure the substance is being heated evenly by the bath of hot water/oil - the evaporation happens because the thing is put under a partial vacuum.
@ThePhoton As stated in the article: "airfoil must be positioned at a slight positive angle ... otherwise the airflow around the upper and lower surfaces would be the same, and no lift would be created" (emphasis mine.) But if you really don't think that creates lift, I'd be interested in how you explain this.
@Robin Vortices inspire motion in their content that can drop pressure in a few ways. Two quick examples: (A) if the content's compressible, as is air and to a much lesser degree water, then the content will form a high-pressure region at the cup's edge, leaving a low-pressure region of lower density in the center; (B) if the cup lacks a top, then the content can be ejected from the vortex.
@ThePhoton: It does not. If you look at wind tunnel videos you will see that regardless of weather an airfoil is upside-down at an angle or symmetrical at an angle the side that has lower pressure also have air moving faster. This is true even for a flat sheet of cardboard tilted at an angle. The Bernoulli principle holds in that lower pressure = higher speed. The issue is causation. Does air moving faster cause the low pressure or does the low pressure cause air to move faster.
@ThePhoton: But this problem is only a human brain problem. The maths don't care. What governs weather lift is generated is the Navier-Stokes equations. But unfortunately the equations don't tell us much about cause and effect. They only calculate pressure given a set of conditions. So we know the math well (the Navier-Stokes equations was developed at the request of the British Royal Navy 150 years ago before airplanes) but the math does not explain it in a way that allows the human brain to understand it intuitively. Hence all the endless debates
Discussion on answer by Nat: Can I ma…
Discussion on answer by Nat: Can I ma…