I appreciate the effort. I believe that what the home needs is a proper urinal (as I keep telling my wife when she brings up a certain topic), but the idea of a flip-out urinal is one that I think raises more problems than it solves. Especially at two AM.
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If it doesn't shoot out tiny high-velocity droplets of urine that my face is within the range of, I'm all for it.
Boy, do I hate toilets.
First of all, 6l (about 1.65 gal) is about one-third of a "full flush", if you actually want the waste to go down the typical drain and not require the use of a plumber's helper. (NB; yes, I know how to use one, and often have to with my modern, up-to-date, ecologically-responsible "low-flow" jake's.)
Second, the urinal has no crook, meaning that you may get the no.1 to go down, but the wonderful ammonia smell is going to linger, to say the least.
The flush toilet worked just fine until the modernists decided to "improve" it. Thereby forgetting the first rule of industrial design; knowing when to leave well enough alone.
Nobody has ever managed to "improve" the claw hammer or the screwdriver; but some people keep trying. Toilets are much the same thing, except that misguided "improvements" to basic hand tools in the name of "political correctness", etc., do not generally constitute risks to public health.
Badly-designed and ineffective toilets damned well do; ask anyone who has ever witnessed a cholera outbreak.
cheers
eon
Eon, do you actually mean to say that the envirosaviors in Cali might not have the right idea with their waterless toilets??? :)
Wesley;
They are a classic example of the eternal yearning for dreams to triumph over reality.
Unfortunately, "dreams" and "reality" are semantically equivalent to "airplanes" and "the ground", as per Whittle's Law:
"Historically speaking, in every conflict between an airplane and the ground, the ground has won every time."
-Bill Whittle
cheers
eon
Eon, Just goes to show the dreams that work best work with reality. That's probably how we got things like the flush toilet, washing machines, the IC engine, motors, electronics, etc. Some clever blokes applying ingenuity to dreams to make some bits of life easier and/or better, that turned out to help a lot of people. I suppose the airplane falls in that list somewhere, too. Or hopefully flies in the list.
Wesley;
Exactly. The "low-flow" toilet, by comparison, was "designed" by people who were fundamentally unfamiliar with fluid dynamics, hydraulics, plumbing, and waste management. Many of them with law degrees.
In short, they were typical environmentalists.
The Wright Brothers didn't have law degrees. They just learned how flying things, like birds, actually flew. The result was the first practical airplane. They had been beaten for "first, period", by Hiram Maxim, Clement Ader', Samuel Pierpont Langley, and Wilhelm Kress. (On Lake Tullnerbach, in Austria, in October 1901. Like Langley, his engine was too heavy and too low in HP, and he ended up going "splat", fortunately non-fatally.)
But then, Alexander Graham Bell only got the patent for the telephone by getting to the patent office half-an-hour ahead of three other scientist/engineers who had developed the same principle, all four of them working with no knowledge of the others. (One of the three was Thomas Edison.)
Generally speaking, dreamers who actually know something about the principles their visions will have to work on will be a lot more successful than those who simply insist that it has to work because "it's the right thing to do".
(The above examples, BTW, are from one of my all-time favorite recreational "reads", "Connections" by James Burke.)
cheers
eon
Eon, it's Amazon time. (Not the big fighting women.) As we've been commenting back and forth it's obvious that a subtext to all these wonderful things we've mentioned is how so much of what's been achieved was made possible by earlier advances. Standing on the shoulders of giants, indeed! I haven't looked into the book (but will get it soon enough), though I suspect Mr. Burke ties a lot of the necessary groundwork together in "Connections", along with the interesting and apparently rather common frequency that discoveries and inventions often seem to be arrived at independently by different people in such close proximity chronologically. Perhaps it's not merely random chance in operation. No, not to worry; I'm not one who subscribes to space aliens or conspiratorial cabals either - More like great minds utilizing knowledge of previous states of the arts and arriving at similar conclusions, whose observations of reality allow creation of tools and products that enrich our lives. (Like BREAD!)
Wesley;
You're in luck. "Connections" (1976) is back in print in a nice trade PB edition.
You also might like Burke's other book "The Day The Universe Changed", about the effects of pure science (cosmology, mathematics, Darwin and Wallace, etc.) have had on society. It's interesting to compare the state of the European universities in the 16th and 17th Centuries to the state of higher education today. (Burke calls the colleges of that day "temples of irrelevant logic-chopping"- sounds familiar.)
In both books, Burke shows that the relationships aren't as linear as we are led to think. In the first chapter of "Connections", he explains how the 1965 New York blackout was caused by one switch in a power station at Niagara Falls.
In the second, he explains how schist being used as a touchstone to assay the purity of gold led to a gadget that we still worry about every day. (Hint- it developed from weather forecasting.)
I won't spoil it for you. Half the fun of reading the book is never knowing where each chapter will end up. ;-)
cheers
eon
Eon, both "Connections" and "The Day The Universe Changed" are available. Woo-hoo! Adding to my library.
Not sure why you're putting Darwin and Wallace in with pure science (like cosmology and mathematics) - did this comment poster delete a line on you?
Always appreciate your reading suggestions. You obviously have a well-tuned mind; your reading interests and mine line up nicely! :)
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