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Comment by hansthehorse | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading that 70% of the male bodies the coast guard recovers have their zipper down. I frequently fish offshore alone here in SE Florida and when I have to go I pee in an aft corner and wash it down with the raw water hose.

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It sounds like an offhand factoid (i.e a myth), just such a typical thing that happily spreads.

The first safety instruction I received from my skipper on joining her boat was, "pee in the head, not overboard".

It's not a myth.

> 70% of the male bodies the coast guard recovers have their zipper down

If this is not a myth, we should be able to find the source.

I'm one of those weird assholes who, after having read this, will have it instantly jolted back into my awareness in the unfortunate event I ever go overboard, causing me to zip my fly when I should be fighting for my life.

And yes, I do own a ocean-going vessel.

I was about to say urine is sterile: just go where you are, but it turns out that scientists have found some microbiota in urine. [0] All the same the germs don’t seem harmful unlike those found in feces, so just go where you are unless you’ve been eating asparagus or something.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4659483/

Perhaps it's an idea to secure yourself with a safety line when you need to pee on a boat.

I've sailed a lot on small, open boats, and I tend to lean against the rigging. That gives me something to hold onto.

In boats large enough to have multiple people on them, there is going to be a head available (in the US it's part of a tax loophole), but people still pee off the side. If you do so the other people on the boat very much appreciate you using the leeward-most part of the boat, where rigging is not always available.

If you heave-to whenever someone needs to relieve themselves, you get a double bonus - a smoother motion in the water and rigging to hold on to.

I forgot at what course I used to do it. Possibly several, but yeah, always leeward of course. But even at regular beam reach[0], you can still stand between the sail and the shroud[0]. At broad reach[0] or running downwind[0], you can also use the fore stay[0].

[0] I have no idea what the English words for sailing terms are, so I'm googling all of this. Hopefully correctly.

You have the right words :)

doesn’t Home Depot or west marine sell a 5 gallon bucket sized toilet? That might keep your boat cleaner especially if you get hit by a rouge wave like right before you can rinse.

I would imagine a similarly high portion of bodies have BAC

Buckets are a thing.

If you think about it, a boat is basically a bucket.

Are you saying I should pee into the boat?

A bucket can also be a boat.

Even Noah's ark was a waterproof round wicker basket (coracle). Although good point, I never thought about what they did with all the animal waste.

In modern times, livestock is regularly shipped en masse from places with surplus arable land, like Australia, to places with a dearth of arable land, like Saudi Arabia, although I don't know what happens to the animal waste.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_export

Interesting tangent from reading that page, the 'Seagoing Cowboys':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagoing_cowboys

I think the animal waste is washed into the sea. Presumably there are sumps on the deck and someone hoses the deck (and animals!) with seawater.

> Using the table below, and assuming one million head of cattle a year, 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of excrement per head per day, an average voyage time of 10 days and vessel loading and unloading times of five days, something in the order of 300,000 tons of excrement is pumped into the sea during these voyages each year. A similar calculation for sheep, voyaging more typically for 20 days, would add a further 85,000 tons.

> The excrement has a high water content and is considered benign. It is treated like sewage under Marpol Annex IV and doesn’t need to be treated before dumping far from shore.

https://maritime-executive.com/features/live-export-followin...

An imaginary waterproof round wicker basket, therefore quite light and permeable.

It’s like the semipermeable membrane in all those gas problems from stat mech.

People who take the story literally today (largely American evangelicals), are usually also pretty adamant that they should take the dimensions in Genesis 6:15 literally - "The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high"[1] and made of "cypress wood" coated in "pitch".

Can you tell me where the "round wicker basket" description came from?

[1] NIV Footnote: That is, about 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high or about 135 meters long, 23 meters wide and 14 meters high

I'm not that commenter but it's actually really interesting! There's a Babylonian tablet that predates Genesis by some time and has very similar instructions. A group in India actually built one following the tablet's instructions!

https://www.telegraphindia.com/7-days/the-ark-that-finkel-bu...

A key excerpt from above link:

> So was there an actual flood of biblical proportions in Babylon? Finkel believes that there was a real fear of flooding and stories of death and destruction that arose from these anxieties. 'The myth of the flood story, to build the boat, is an antidote to this very fear.'

I love rational explanations for mythology and it makes so much sense to me that periodic flooding would have been a problem since the dawn of agrarian civilization, and it makes sense that our forebears would have aspired to this idea of having the doomsday raft ready to go when the big one hits.

my personal theory based on nothing but it makes sense to me for the time period, is that if there is truth to the story, it was actually referring to saving domesticated farm animals so Noah and fam could start over.

There's a lot of ancient stories about a massive flood in that area with someone building a boat and saving animals, so maybe that's a thing that really happened. But it's most likely a massive river (Eufrates & Tigris?) flood or possibly even the filling of the Black Sea deluge[0], and involved mostly farm animals, not lions and kangaroos.

(As a Christian I'm totally comfortable with the idea that some stories in the Bible are just stories and don't have to be literally true.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

Hmm.. the ‘myth as an antidote to fear’ idea only makes sense if humans were on the ark. It makes more sense interpreted as a warning as to the coming future. The earth will survive no matter what, you may not. Making minds and hearts fear, not fear antidote.

In my experience female passengers especially appreciate a bucket with a privacy towel.

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