In Why do you blow on coffee to cool it, but on your hands to warm them? Plus: if veggies have no fat, why is veggie oil all fat? - The Straight Dope, for both the original answer and the “corrected” answer - you have missed the main reason that moving air cools off the coffee. It is not due to temperature differences or evaporation, etc. It is due to the effect of thermal mass transfer all in accordance with King’s Law, named after the man who first described it about 100 years ago. Essentially - the fluid (gas or liquid) flowing by the hot object takes up heat as a function of the amount of mass flowing by. The more mass, the more heat gets taken away and the hot object cools. Check it out - lots of info on the web about thermal mass transfer. It has lots of practical uses, though probably none as important as cooling off your coffee.
Did you read the ENTIRE column, all the way to the bottom, or just the first part? And if so, how did you determine that the rate of evaporation is a lesser factor than thermal mass transfer?
Yes, of course I did.
Because I work with this stuff all the time. It is an easy experiment - take a an iron rod and heat it up - then check how quickly it cools. No evaporation, but under flow conditions it cools faster. Faster flow - it cools faster. Denser fluid (liquid or gas) - the faster it cools as a function of the amount of mass flowing by.
Of course, there are many contributions to the cooling - including thermal conduction, convection, radiation, evaporation,etc - but in Cecil’s experiments with the dryer, the dominant factor was clearly the thermal mass transfer due to convection to the flowing air. Note that it was similarly effective when blowing across the top of the coffee and when blowing at the cup (though there was probably a significant change in evaporation).
BTW, did you read my answer all the way to the end? Did you look into the subject of thermal transfer? Here’s a reference to King’s original paper on the subject, if you’re interested: “On the Convection of Heat from Small Cylinders in a Stream of Fluid” published in 1914 - available at: http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/214/509-522/373.citation
Best,
Yosh