Now that's a large

Thar she blows!
It's no secret that fast food drinks keep getting bigger. I'm fairly sure after a recent visit to a Schlotsky's that they've removed 'small' as a drink option. Aside from the fact that none of their drinks might in fact be small, it's psychologically jarring for me to start out at medium. Medium implies it's the middle.

I digress. This really isn't about size craziness. We're all past that now. You order a Starbucks now you order a Tall or a Venti or whatever. If we're using what I imagine are made up names for sizes why should anyone care if words that up to this point have actually described drink sizes are re purposed.

This is really about whether there isn't a Moore's Law for beverage containers. For those who don't know, Moore's Law, according to Wikipedia, "...describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware, in which the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years." I'll trust my engineering/physics friends to spell this out in formulas, but essentially, I'm wondering about the increasing requirements of beverage containers. As the volume of liquid increases (I got a large today at Jack in the Box and that thing must be 44oz) the outward pressure on the cup must be increasing . Can styrofoam handle it? Are we on the verge of an innovation in inexpensive, disposable cup materials, or will we be stuck at this point in our thirst quenching development history? Can we pull together to push modern science to the point where we hit the 86oz mark?