Not sure how these are that "new" seeing as Toto (and I'm almost assuming other Japanese brands too) have had designs like the Nautilus for some years. One of the things that stuck with me a lot after a trip to Japan was exactly how thoughtful their toilet designs are. Public toilets with these tall urinals were amazingly clean in even the busiest stations and would allow you to get a good angle and not have splash on to the floor/shoes. Similar designs but scaled down were found in their newer Limited Express trains. Also, that angular design makes no sense, a human being will need to clean it and for anyone whos ever had to clean angular ceramics, they will know that that design will just be a pain to get proper clean...
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.
And increase bathroom construction costs by 25-100% while reducing capacity by 50%! We don't have big shared troughs in sports stadium restrooms because of preference, it's purely cost and capacity. Urinals serve a similar purpose.
We had that contemporary commercial in one office building, but it was slightly elongated. The splash back was horrific and unavoidable. Angle, distance, approach, absolutely nothing prevented it. It was so bad we finally had open conversations about it and many of us went to standing at the regular toilets.
At my employer we have an emergency location (glorified office) that we basically never operate out of except one afternoon a quarter to prove we can. The documentation about how to operate out of that site includes a warning to that effect.
Edit: Now that I think about it building has been remodeled so I should really have someone confirm if the warning is still valid.
Contractually required. Clients want assurance of continuity of business in case a meteor hits our office or an errant backhoe hits the fiber on our street. We use it for real about one day every 2-2.5yr. It's only enough space for the dozen key people we need to field urgent stuff.
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.
Finance stuff. Where I work it's more of an inherited checkbox than an actual mission critical requirement but I suppose it would help us if it really came down to it and the customers see enough value in it that they pay for it so...
It makes sense to have a business continuity plan for various scenarios that could render the primary office location unusable (power outage, natural disaster, police closing the area for some reason, ...).
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.
The thing is, for men, sitting pee is only viable if *everyone* do it. As soon as a minority break this rule, the toilet is freaking dirty and you need to pee standing again.
This is made a problem by people that insist on standing at a regular toilet or working through what I assume is a severe medical issue with reckless abandon for the next person
just because some people have to sit peeing (cultural reason or otherwise) doesn't mean everyone else should do that when they don have to. The fact is that it has to "occur to" them instead of something they just naturally do.
> We propose novel urinal designs that were generated by solving differential equations derived from the isogonal curve problem to ensure the urine stream impacts at or below this critical angle. Experiments validate that these designs can substantially reduce splashback to only 1.4% of the splash of a common contemporary commercial urinal. The widespread adoption of the urinal designs described in this work would result in considerable conservation of human resources, cost, cleaning chemicals, and water usage, rendering large-scale impacts on modern society by improving sustainability, hygiene, and accessibility.
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.
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.
No, it wouldn't. This is just angles. Angles don't change. Gravity is stable and points roughly to the center of the planet. Viscosity changes won't change the angle of anything. That's the entire point.
> 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.
I didn't misread anything. I was replying to your claim with statements, from the paper itself, that invalidate your statement.
The study used an experimental design that ignores those variables, because, they claim, they do not apply to human urination, without citing any resources.
I hate to break it to you, but most of the urine on rhe floor isn't from splashback. Splashback is mostly solved with existing designs and splash screen/baffle inserts.
I agree. The urine on floor is because people are generally less careful in public toilet when aiming, peeing, fully draining, and flicking.
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.
I think the "Cornucopia" model is a great example of "blind" design that works a lot better in theory/fluid dynamics simulations than it would in actual usage. I would expect a significant percentage of users to find the "hole" design... uninviting, and as a result stand way farther back than the simulation assumed. (Exhibit 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43669248)
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).
> Around 1 million liters (264,172 gallons) of urine are spilled onto the floor and walls of public restrooms each day in the U.S.
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.
There is a "Daily Urine Splash Estimation in the US" section in their paper (I can't believe I looked this up). There equation basically makes these assumptions:
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.
Bit of a tangent but occasionally I wonder how close we are to people disappearing into cyberspace for 10 hours at a time and thus using a Texas catheter à laNeuromancer. It seems like there are a notable minority of tech people who regard meat and meat space as an annoyance to be dealt with.
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?
It depends on how you were uploaded. If they scanned your brain and recreated it, that would be a copy. But what if they scanned your brain once a week and each week, replaced a billion neurons with cloud-based ones? There would never be a time where there were two “yous” and whatever personality changes that came from having faster and more accurate digital neurons would be spread out over several years, much like children growing into adults.
Let's explore the concept of "cloud based ones" neurons. Let's say your brain has just three neurons, connected with each other. You remove one of them, and connect the two remaining one an external terminal - a physical device capable of transmitting electrical currents, being controlled by some complicated software "in the cloud". That physical device becomes the third neuron. Instead of one terminal, it could be two different devices, together playing the role of the original third neuron for each of the two other original neurons. For simplicity, let's assume there's just one terminal, serving both remaining original neurons, just like the third original neuron did. From the point of view of the two remaining biological neurons, nothing has changed. But from the point of view of the third neuron - the replaced one - the system did change. Now it is connected to three other terminals: two original one, and one other physical terminal "in the cloud". That other terminal in the cloud is part of the software, so it is connected to potentially billions of other terminals (e.g. transistors). And all of them are now involved in playing the role of the original third neuron that we replaced. So we effectively replaced a system of three interconnected neurons with a system of billions of interconnected neurons. This can have a profound effect on the "consciousness" of the original brain (in quotes because I don't consciousness is possible with just three neurons).
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.
We should clarify the definition of "uploading". I see two cases:
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.
That is an interesting perspective. I actually think that a gradual shift to an emulated brain would keep you more “you” than replacing neurons in place with non-biological neurons. The reason is the emulation and is why I used the watch analogy, which was not about duplication vs transferring, but was about how emulation of physical objects and the connections between them is the same, for all intents and purposes, as the “real” version.
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.
I'm having trouble understanding, or perhaps, accepting, your point of view. When you say "It’s physical properties would be emulated in software", what really happens is still electrical signals flowing between transistors. "Software" is a concept - it does not exist in a physical world - it's our interpretation of the physical processes that happen when we apply voltage to transistors. I'm not 100% sure, but I think that consciousness might similarly be a concept - "our" interpretation of what is going on between our biological neurons. Note I put "our" in quotes, because it's self-referential here, and that's why I'm not 100% sure. But if we get back to my 3 neuron scenario, the third neuron which is emulated by the external system has not disappeared into the "software". It's still a physical device, which functions in a physical world, and is part of the original brain, despite the fact that it is now physically different from the original biological neuron it has replaced. It still produces (relays) the same signals towards the original two neurons, but it does not compute those signals. 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.
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.
>"Software" is a concept - it does not exist in a physical world - it's our interpretation of the physical processes that happen when we apply voltage to transistors.
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.
Not sure if that's the cause of the problem here, but this is why having urinals is a good idea and even legally required in some countries.
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.
The cone over the drain, and/or the spiked mats (both inside the urinal) seem to have stopped all splashing and be widely used in UK without need to change the urinal itself.
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.
came here to say this... I'd wager more urine ends up on the floor due to accuracy than urinal design. Still... glad they are focused on some of life's most difficult problems
Ants have recently invaded the men's room at my office where the first floor is dug in a meter below ground level. They are loving the section in front of the urinals where the diabetics have left an ample food supply.
Sitting would be preferable if the savages lifted seats to urinate and more toilet bowls shapes were steeper. A surprise dip in the devil's fondue is enough to make fella want to remove it and leave it there.
Do they really use 90% less water cleaning the floors of women's restrooms than men's currently? Cause that's one implication of the 'new design will save cleaning' claim. Places with public restrooms that I'm familiar with seem to get their floors mopped with identical frequency (and similar apparent rigor) regardless of whether they have urinals or not.
This seems to be an engineered-only solution without real world testing.
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.
A couple of times I’ve used some ancient urinals that look more like a wall with a drain at the bottom. Seems like a much better design?
The second picture:
Also real world installation. I am an average height dude, but have encountered several urinals which are barely useable. No idea how shorter men or children are supposed to operate them.
I've actually made a joke for years that we're gonna put boots on mars before we figure out how to not piss on our pants. I've been trying to ask Elon on Twitter to design a urinal for years as a joke. This is amazing.
We have the Fountaine at work, and it works just fine, as long as you don’t aim towards the fly but instead aim towards the drain hole of the water at the bottom.
Funny btw, if you hold the flush button too long, the entire thing overflows.
Pee drains still smell bad and require extra cost to plumb more drains.
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.
I haven't been to Japan and just looked at some photos and it seems they are different than the design proposed in the paper. The paper shows a much more angular "V" shaped cross-section with steep sides ending in a point vs a rounded back where splashes occur.
Why can't we go back to the (what I now know after Googling) is the Kohler Derry or something along those lines?
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.
Can I get one at home? Seriously - I just painted our bathroom and it's just disgusting how much splashing winds up splashing out of the bowl and onto other surfaces.
Agreed. I have a wife and two daughters. Out of respect for them I sit (or camp hover) and thus they don't have to wade through my piss splatter. Even if I lived by myself I'd still do it for the sake of not wanting my pee all over my own bathroom.
And... Try having a stool, like a one-step folding stool under the feet while sitting. Drastically changes the experience for the better while sitting. There was a post on HN long time ago on it with research on it. It aligns more with how the body is designed to preform the other need for elimination, and my suspicion is it applies to the first category of elimination too.
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.
Standing is drastically more time efficient. You just have to look at the snaking queues at the women’s restroom compared to the men’s in any particularly busy public space.
Who wants to bother with undoing their pants just to pee?
This is a valid concern, as a stranger you can't know if this design doesn't have a surprise. And then there's this potential contact point at the bottom of V.
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!
I’m with you. Being able to maintain sanitary facilities with less effort is justification enough. The amount of water used to mop a floor doesn’t vary by how much urine spills.
At least they didn’t try to make a carbon impact pitch.
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.