New urinal designs
livescience.com
livescience.com
I guess what I'm saying is, before we start researching new methods, why can't we be bothered to spend even a little bit of time to see what else is out there.
Their design seems a lot smaller though if you look at the pictures.
Obligatory nod to the infamous sign:
"Gents Please Stand A Little Closer, It May Be Shorter Than You Think.
"Ladies Please Remain Seated for The Entire Performance."
One small step forward, one giant leap for civilization.
F Street Station, in Anchorage, AK
The struggle is real.
Edit: Now that I think about it building has been remodeled so I should really have someone confirm if the warning is still valid.
Previously we had clients required us cross train a handful of key employees on their specific stuff so they could acqui-hire those people to maintain their stuff in the event our company went tits up on short notice (we actually saw them exercise that with a prior vendor). They no longer do that as we're much bigger now.
For many businesses, WFH or "everyone goes to the Winchester, we have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over" could be valid options, but if you want to have business continuity, having at least a small office where the disaster recovery team can meet and coordinate things from makes sense.
A contract for guaranteed priority access with a coworking space would likely be the easiest option unless you need some custom infrastructure though.
Did it occur to "some of you" that _sitting_ on a regular toilet might also be a viable option?
Asking for a friend.
At home though, 100%
https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/4/pgaf087/80987...
The experiments aren't in real world scenarios or with real urethrae excreting urine.
> A pseudo-urethra nozzle matching the internal geometry of a human urethra was used to “urinate” a controlled jet of dyed water onto urinals and the subsequent splash was caught on a large paper on the floor.
Physics is physics though. Urine is not a magical substance that can violate conservation of momentum or the law of gravity.
No, but people do have urine (specific gravity, consistency, etc), physical (flow rate differences, penile dimensional differences, urinary meatus differences, etc), and behavioral differences (unkempt urinary meatus, different holding patterns, shaking, shy bladder, etc) which would affect those ideal scenarios.
> Importantly, the dynamic viscosity µ and surface tension γ do not change across our experiments, nor in the context of human urination.
From the paper:
> Splash generated from a jet or droplet train impinging on a flat surface is a complex phenomenon depending on many factors, including the impact speed (U), impinging angle (θ), dynamic viscosity (μ), density (ρ), diameter of the jet or droplet (D), surface tension (γ) of the liquid, ambient pressure (P), as well as the wettability, contact angle, and roughness of the surface. ... In the context of urination, most of these factors cannot be changed. However, the impinging angle can be controlled to reduce or eliminate splash.
The study used an experimental design that ignores those variables, because, they claim, they do not apply to human urination, without citing any resources.
When we're outside, we are generally more in rush. We had to 'hold in' longer before peeing because of line. It's unfamiliar setting with weirdly shaped urinal.
And in some parts of Europe, urinals are installed so god damn high, I almost have to tip toe and pee into the the air in projectile.
Sounds like an alternate origin story of your username.
The best way to validate such findings would likely be 3D-printing single use versions of different urinals, mounting them at the student pub for one Friday evening, and monitoring usage amounts + the amount of urine on the floor mats (compared with a regular urinal next to it to account for different inebriation levels). This also avoids identifying models that men prefer/avoid if given the choice.
(Also a great way to advertise that "90% of patrons preferred the new urinals" because you'll get that effect from the novelty value alone).
Each day?! 165 million males in the USA. So, 16.5 males on average are peeing enough on the walls and floors that if it was collected it would be an entire liter? That seems unlikely.
What percentage of that 16.5 is not using public restrooms? What percentage is babies in diapers? Even if the number was as high as half, 8 men leaving behind a collective 1 liter seems way too high.
1. 56 million non-residential urinals in the US.
2. average of .22 L per "void" (a void is one pee session)
3. I think how they estimated average usage per urinal was weird and frankly wrong - they estimated each person would have between 3 and 6 "voids" per day, and each urinal would be used by between 1 and 2 people per day. Anyway, in any case that leads to an estimate of each urinal being used between 3 and 12 times per day. I think this estimate is way, way too high, because at the low end 3 X 56 million = 168 million, so on the low end they are estimating that, on average, every male in the US makes at least one public urinal pee (and, on the high end, 4 public urinal pees!)
4. Based on their data they calculate a value of ~1% (0.965%) of pee gets splashed onto the floor.
So you multiply that all together: 56 million * .22 * (3 on the low end, 12 on the high end) * .965% = about 350,000L on the low end, or 1,400,000L on the high end, so they said "on the order of a million liters".
Again, I can't believe I spent time looking this up and writing this comment.
But probably, what, only 50m use public restrooms, but some use multiple times, so 150 uses / liter seems reasonable.
That's under 10ml of spray / spill per use, which is maybe a little high but not too crazy? I've seen some pretty bad spill results at work...
That's not achievable with backsplatter, that's called "missing".
How many of you would be happy at this moment to upload yourself to the cloud if it meant low latency, unmitigated access to computers, the internet, LLMs etc?
You mean “upload a copy of yourself”, right? I guess I would be happy for my uploaded copy to live forever while I continue to age.
Can you poke holes in the reasoning above?
I don’t see why I would. It would change you and I said that in my original comment. But it would change you slowly over time on the order of years, much like how children change dramatically from say 7 to 17. They are still the same person even though their mental capacity and personality of grown and evolved significantly. I should have said a billion neurons a month, instead of a week though, since weekly would be replacement in less than two years but monthly would be over 8 years.
>So we effectively replaced a system of three interconnected neurons with a system of billions of interconnected neurons
If I had any quibble, it would be this statement. I while I would say it replaces a system of 3 parts with one with billions, I wouldn’t say it is effectively billions of neurons. In the same way I would say that emulating a mechanical watch in software would have much more transistors per watch part emulated, I wouldn’t say there were effectively billions of second hands.
1. We gradually replace each neuron in-place - without any external connections. This means a biological brain slowly turns into a silicon brain (or whatever material used for new neurons)
2. We gradually replace each neuron with a connection to an external computational system which provides the signals that the original neuron would output. This is what I mean when I say "brain uploading".
The first case is more straightforward, and I'm not discussing it here - I expect it to be possible when the technology is ready.
The second case might have fundamental issues. The main issue is about preservation of consciousness - let's try to define it first. Consciousness is a property of a brain, which most likely depends on the signals between neurons, and which might or might not additionally depend on each neuron internal electrochemical state. When we change a brain we change its consciousness. If we change it too much, we might alter consciousness to the degree where it is not longer the same identity. This might be happening to a degree as a person grows, though I'd argue that the person would still be the same, in a sense that the person would consider himself to remain the same person over the years. For example, I remember myself 20 years ago, and even though I was somewhat different in terms of views, habits, drives, etc, I'm sure I was still me - I was not my neighbor Mike - I'm still the same captain of mostly the same ship. If we replace neurons as in case 1 above, I believe the continuity of consciousness can be preserved. But in case 2, I'm not so sure, because we are fundamentally changing the structure of the brain, not just individual components. Going back to my original example of just 3 neurons, replacing one neuron with a silicon based device in-place does not fundamentally change the overall structure of the 3-neuron brain. It's still just 3 neurons operating together as a whole. However, if we replace one neuron with a connection to an external computer, we no longer have the 3-neuron brain. We have 2 neurons which operate as before, because they still receive the same inputs from the third neuron as before, but the third neuron has fundamentally changed - it is now receiving external signals that the original third neuron did not receive, and therefore, the structure of the original brain is now different. I don't know if we can claim the consciousness of the original 3-neuron brain is preserved. The problem is that the other two neurons cannot adapt to this change, because from their point of view nothing has changed. Now if we consider that the brain has 100B neurons, and we replaced 50B neurons per case 2 - now I'm not sure what is happening to the consciousness because half of the brain is receiving external signals from some complex computational system. Does new consciousness extend to that external system? Why, or why not? If yes, how is it impacted?
Re: "emulating a mechanical watch in software". Can we upload the mechanical watch to the cloud? No, we can only replicate it. But that is not relevant to our discussion, because a mechanical watch has no consciousness which could change or be transferred.
In your 3 neuron brain analogy, the emulated neuron would not be receiving external signals. It’s physical properties would be emulated in software so the neuron would function i.e. behave the same way, as the original. Much the same way that an emulated mechanical watch mainspring will tension when you “wind” it and release that energy to “power” the watch the same as the watch it was emulating. Of course the winding, tension, etc. aren’t really happening. They are software running in a computer, but the key is they are behaving in the same way as a real watch component.
Back to our emulated third neuron, it would not really be going through the electrochemical process of changing its action potential based on the chemical signal received from one of the other two neurons. What it would be doing is emulating that process in software in the same way as the biological one it replaced. It is not “receiving external signals” in that it is not a computer serving as a neuron, or like plugging your brain into a computer so you can directly interface with it. It is a computer running software and that software is running a physics engine of a neuron and the only external signals transmitted to that neuron running in software is an emulated duplicate of the signal sent from one of the other two neurons. However the neuron responds based on the rules of the physics engine, which again is built so that the neuron will behave the same as its biological model, would be converted to a real signal sent back to the other two neurons. So, nothing would fundamentally change for the other neurons to adapt to.
Now, lets look at the non-biological silicon (or whatever material) brain. A silicon neuron would not behave the same as a biological one because it is made of totally different materials, likely chosen to act faster, more efficiently, more accurately, etc. In that case, the new neuron would not respond in the same as the biological one it replaced. I would say that would alter the functioning of the brain much more drastically.
However, if we look at consciousness differently - as something that is purely in the signals and not in the physical devices carrying the signals, then it changes the perspective. In that case it's harder for me to imagine the effect of extending computational signals into the cloud, because I'm not sure if the external signals become an extension of the original consciousness, or if they become more like sensory inputs to the local brain - but then the local brain becomes smaller? It's hard for me to comprehend this perspective.
Not exactly. Software is still a physical thing, in that it is a specific configuration of transistors, or disk magnetization, etc. An emulation is a specific configuration of those transistors to replicate how the original object behaves according to physics.
> Both the inputs and outputs of this new proxy neuron are different, because it has to communicate with the external system. The two original neurons still communicate with a physical device, not with some abstract software entity.
They do only interact with the software indirectly, but if it is properly emulated, it will behave in the exact same way. To simplify even more than a 3 neuron system, I want to talk about logic gates. As I’m sure you know, logic gates are the basic building block of a computer that perform simple operations like AND, NOT, OR. Well, you can build mechanical version, like this [1] one with marbles. So you can build a super simple computer using marbles and physical gates. Now what if you build a machine that would input and output marbles according to software emulation of a physical gate and a falling marble? Even though the physical logic gates connected to it would be interacting with a complex physical computer, not the abstract software entity, the results would be identical. If you built a computer with half physical logic gates and half marble input/output machines controlled by abstracted emulated logic gates, the computer would still function the same. I think that if you did it with neurons, the brain would function the same.
It seems to me that neurons are biological variations of logic gates. They receive electrochemical input based on a limited number of options, and based on physical differences in how the neuron is wired and what input it receives, the neuron produces and output based on a limited number of options. We have seen through many medical cases that every part of your personality can be changed by physical changes to your brain, either injury, disease, or surgery. There is no core “you” separate from the interaction of 100 billion neurons. So to me, if half those neurons are actually a software “abstraction”, I don’t see why my subjective experience would be any different.
[1] https://www.nathanielbrookes.com/articles/marble-logic-gate/
I couldn't care less about whether the sit-down toilets are mixed or separated by gender, but replacing most/all urinals with gender-neutral sit-down toilets yields results that suck for everyone involved.
What one does find now is dyson-style hands dryers leave a massive area of spray. They seem to spray the water from your hands - and the water retained on the device - up into the air and across a wide area.
At our work place there are bench style sinks that spray water everywhere too.
And the sit-down toilets are terrible. I'm not an especially large man but it's almost impossible to use them without unnecessary contact. Sit-down toilets seem to be 'designed' by people who have no idea about their use by men.
Took me a moment to realize you were referring to The Witch's Kiss. And yes, I fully agree on all points.
(and when I thought that was a peak bottom design, they made blowers integrated in the faucet, to blow around all the yuck from the sink.)
urinals are not small targets.
A person teetering wildly 3 feet above are still going to miss that narrow design. Or you have to hover and let your pants touch the rim, which also probably puts you closer to the inevitable splash back.
The only clear solution is to direct all splash back to the user so they can take it with them.
https://www.stainlessrestorations.co.nz/before-after-cleanin...
https://blog.siggraph.org/2021/02/a-look-back-at-past-emergi...
Funny btw, if you hold the flush button too long, the entire thing overflows.
Nasty urinals are a compounding problem as the grosser the bathroom the further people stand from the urinal which means the aim is worse and the bathroom gets worse.
You know the saying, an oz of prevention…
We had them in middle and high school and while I understand they might not be ideal for the inebriated or exceptionally careless you could piss anywhere in them as hard as you wanted without splash back.
Decades later I encountered one in a maintenance facility nestled in the corner of maintenance shop, obviously not a code compliant install, spare me the hand wringing) and casually mentioned that I didn't know they still made them like that and was told that this is the 3rd facility it has been installed in, the guys like it enough to uninstall it and reinstall it each time.
Occasional spills are probably easier to manage compared to a misunderstanding over it's purpose.
also, both hands free for phone.
People don't pee standing because of some sense of masculinity or something. It's just more convenient. Only those over 50 or so by now grew up with that stigma.
Who wants to bother with undoing their pants just to pee?
That really depends on the design at both sides.
Edit: Otherwise, it's a civilized way to do it and nothing to be ashamed of. Men who think it's not manly can go clean their toilet again.
People don't stand pee because of some sense of masculinity or something. It's just more convenient.
And once the puddle underneath has formed, everyone else will stand even further back...
Cleaning a floor with urine on it uses a certain amount of water, no matter what. You can get away with cleaning it less often, but you can’t get away with using 90% less water!
At least they didn’t try to make a carbon impact pitch.