I'm taking a break from political discussion to comment on coffee mug designs. After all, this blog is called THINK pickle so let's think about this for a second...
I'm having a cup of coffee in my favorite coffee shop and I just discovered something. The design of their coffee mugs is backwards. The mug has a small diameter on the bottom and a large diameter on the top. While aesthetically pleasing to gaze upon, it is horrible inefficient at doing one of it's two major tasks at hand.
The task in question is keeping my coffee warm. A well known fact amongst even high school physics students is that a larger surface area to volume ratio means more rapid cooling. By having the larger diameter at the top of the cup, we have created that larger surface area to volume ratio. This means my coffee, which, like my women, I enjoy hot, is cooling too fast.
There's also a secondary problem with this design and it relates to the second function of a coffee mug: To contain the beverage. As anyone that has tried to take a sharp corner in an SUV at a high speed knows, things with a high center of gravity tend to tip over. By having a higher diameter at the top, my coffee mug contains the bulk of it's volume, and hence, its center of gravity, up higher. This means my coffee mug is more likely to tip over. Not good for a hot cup of coffee (or in this case, a rapidly cooling cup of coffee).
In conclusion, while the "small on the bottom, big on the top" design may serve busty Hollywood actresses well, it has no business being the design of a coffee mug.
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I would also add that evaporative cooling is, by far, the greatest contributor to heat loss from any system including a liquid/gas phase boundary. As such, while the coffee cup described does in fact have a "larger surface area to volume ratio," what really matters is the size of the liquid/gas interface. Although it would look funny, the Hancock Tower would make a better coffee cup than the big-chested Hollywood actress.
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