To flush or not to flush, that is the (pissing) question!
In a laboratory 10 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, a mechanical penis sputters to life. A technician starts a timer as a stream of water erupts from the apparatus’s brass tip, arcing into a urinal mounted exactly 12 inches away. James Krug smiles. His latest back-splatter experiment is under way.Photo: Dan Forbes
After that opening, surely you'll want to read the rest of Joshua Davis' wonderful article in Wired magazine, on the technological, social, institutional, political, and environmental ramifications of urinals. Eye-opening stuff about an everyday piece of technology that you probably never think about even as you are quite literally pissing in it. While trying to minimize that back-splatter.
Of course, this applies mainly to us guys, so the waterless urinal only solves half the world's water-wasting problem. Perhaps even less than that, because ladies' rooms don't have urinals and they are likely wasting (for all I know) a larger tankful per flush on a regular toilet - so are there plans to extend these waterless technologies across that gender gap, I wonder?
After all, as my friend Susannah Lerman reminds me (through pictures she just posted on facebook from her recent trip to the middle east), it is possible to have waterless WCs as well:
Pic ©Susannah Lerman
Of course, this applies mainly to us guys, so the waterless urinal only solves half the world's water-wasting problem. Perhaps even less than that, because ladies' rooms don't have urinals and they are likely wasting (for all I know) a larger tankful per flush on a regular toilet - so are there plans to extend these waterless technologies across that gender gap, I wonder?
After all, as my friend Susannah Lerman reminds me (through pictures she just posted on facebook from her recent trip to the middle east), it is possible to have waterless WCs as well:
Pic ©Susannah Lerman
Don't see any water tank or plumbing behind that throne, do you? You wouldn't, because that, my friends, is a composting toilet, from the Lotan Center for Creative Ecology in Kibbutz Lotan near Eilat in the Arava valley of Israel. Now that's something even more likely to get the clog into the plumbers union, eh?
On a lighter note, pondering the gender differences between excretory technologies reminded me of this classic application of the ideal-free distribution model of habitat selection by Dave Barry to a conundrum faced only by guys: which urinal to choose when faced with a row of them along a public restroom wall. Although, I doubt Barry has ever heard of the ideal-free distribution model.
Have I given your week a good start then, with this Monday morning blog post? No? Well, piss-off then!
2 comments:
Thanks, I hadn't realized the plumbers had been fighting these.
One of the things that amazed me in Tucson was that the no-flush urinals stank less than the manual flush. I got interested enough that I tracked down a copy of the 5711037 patent. It turns out the problem is that manual flush are only rarely flushed, so urine sits in the bowl wafting odors.
--Andre
Interesting! So I wonder if the actual water usage is less than the potential with the conventional urinals, if they are not flushed too often. Besides, in many parts of the world (like India), urinals may basically be a drain without any flushing anyway.
BTW, why does Andre from Tucson ring a bell?
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