random samplings of a restless mind scanning life's canopy
Photo: Dan Forbes
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.
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:
I'm a reconciliation ecologist studying the responses of wildlife to human influences through an evolutionary lens. I seek ways to apply evolutionary ecology towards reconciling biodiversity conservation with human development. Also a father of two girls; photographer; birdwatcher; bookworm; cinephile; and explorer of the internets.
I'm a reconciliation ecologist studying the responses of wildlife to human influences through an evolutionary lens. I seek ways to apply evolutionary ecology towards reconciling biodiversity conservation with human development. Also a father of two girls; photographer; birdwatcher; bookworm; cinephile; and explorer of the internets.
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