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Seeking Relief Down Under, Via Web
HiyaPower writes: "Never let it be said that our friends in Australia are behind the times. According to this
Wired article, an Australian
company, NGIS, will be putting the first searchable database of the location of Australia's 13,000 public toilets on the Web. I mean there you are, far from civilization with only your trusty portable computer and you gotta go, well now you can. Now if only they could do this for working public phone booths ..." I wonder if there is a public-toilet Web ring? If not, this deserves a place of honor on it, as does the down-to-earth besttoilets.com, though I would add to its New York section the very nice restrooms at SIBL.
Didn't the recent tragedy in Australia teach us anything about intermixing our vital activities with the internet? Let's just wait until we all need a satellite connection to go to the toilet... and then a misplaced anchor takes out one of the main fiber lines. Nationwide chaos!
"Sir, the line's been cut! We're spewing data all over the place."
"That's not all that's being spewed, Johnson. May God have mercy on us."
- Michael
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
I wonder if there is a public-toilet Web ring? If not, this deserves a place of honor on it,
But wouldn't there be a Web Tidy-Bowl salesman going around to take care of that ring?
Blaming guns for crime is like blaming keyboards for first posters. More Guns != More Crime
I was just in the trap and the guy in the cubicle next to me used 39 sheets of paper to wipe his arse (I could hear him pulling them out of the dispenser and started counting for some reason)
I was sitting there thinking "Surely he's finished by now..." and then there would come the sound of another sheet being pulled... amazing.
What really alarmed me though was the fact that he left without washing his hands. I tried to get finished in time to see who it was but he was gone... like the wind.
Seems like he needed a searchable database of the locations of the handbasins in the bathroom!!
--feeander--
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Oh babe, I'm good for nothing - Nothing is good enough for me
What information should they keep on the toilet:
Have you read my journal today?
The Wired article contains the following sentence:
"While the company has yet to finalize its tally, it now believes there are as many as 13,000 public toilets in the country, or 4.4 per square mile. "
Now I do not go and check the maths in every lighthearted news story I read, but at a glance, I could see that this number was very wrong. (Either that or Australia was shrinking rapidly)
Australia has an area of 7,741,220 Km2
This is about 2,988,900 square miles.
We have a population of about 18 Million, which is on average 6 per square mile.
If we really have 4.4 public toilets per square mile, we would have about 13 million public toilets - almost as many public toilets as people.
I think somebody lost a decimal place somewhere. If we have 13,000 public toilets, then we have 0.0043 per square mile.
It needs to be WAPable, and then, tied into a location based service, which is plausible with a GSM phone. Then wherever you are, you can find the nearest toilet.
What would be a more advanced business model, would be then to allow users to rate it according to a number of criteria (with, say, levels 1 to 5), and if they do this, give them a small discount on the WAP access cost - i.e. as an incentive to spending the extra time providing some feedback - then future users can see which toilets are better than others.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
A recent survey in the The Economist on Australia pointed to Australias "sensible" use of technology. What they meant, is that rather than the maniac tech frenzy in the United States, what Australian businesses seemed to do was to adopt technology into existing business practices in a much more sensible way - for instance, a guy in the outback producing some sort of original good just creates a pretty basic by effective web page, information and ordering system.
A few more facts - Australia has always had the highest penetration of Internet, we have been rapid earlyt adopters of ISDN and mobile phone technology, electronic banking systems (EFTPOS), and there are probably more examples. We're not super-tech-guru people, but we take the new stuff in our stride. As a people, we tend to be pretty fair minded, pragmatic and sensible, but not adverse to "going over the top" at times, and having a good dose of fun. We're somewhat hedonistic and even pagan in our love of food, sun, outdoors and so on.
(I like my country, can you tell
Matthew Gream
Australian ex-patriot
San Sebastian, Spain
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
DebianPlanet
-- "I can't tell the future, I just work there." -- The Doctor
This would be great for people who wear their computers. This should be done for every urban area.
I am sorry to given that impression. It was certainly not my intention here. While I have some personal quibbles with the Australian government, the contributions of "you folks down under" are per capital the equal of anyone else in the world.
Surely mobile phone users need a WAP version of this site. Or would that be a CWAP version?
Baz
They have built a ethernet card on to most things these days what i propose is to put on a toilet. just think you could flush it remotely
Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.
If you really had to go, and you were in the middle of Australia, would you pop out your laptop, find a place, go to the place, and do your business, or would you find some bushes that are far more convienent?
Can you imagine what the SNMP variables for that would look like?
Can you imagine the results of a DoS attack on the shitters if they were completely remotely driven? (DDoS -- Distributed Disgusting odour (from) Shitters)
If they do have full networking, how long before jokes about "laying some fat pipe" come into common parlance? (Or "stringing some fiber" or ...)
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Well, I say old, it was like 5 years ago at a hellhol-errr-place called TAMS. Anyway, he was really good at math. Really good. So one day he was telling me about this thing called the Steiner Space or something like that (my strong suite is chemistry, not abstract math). And within Steiner Spaces you could find/define something called a Steiner Point (again, it's been ~5 years and I'm not a mathematician), which was the one point in that Steiner Space that would be equidistant to all other (non-capital-S) Steiner Points in that Steiner Space. Seems pretty intuitive in 3space (for a bounded space anyway ("the middle of nowhere")); naturally since mathematicians are all closet perverts, they'd extended this to cover nSpace.
Point being, we were laughing about the possibility of defining a "UNT-Campus-Shitters" Steiner Space where each non-capital-S Steiner Point was a campus crapper. So then you could use rigorous mathematical methods to find the "Shitter Epicenter" of campus, the point at which if you had to crap you could go in any direction....
OK, yeah, so when you're IQ is >= (10*age) (sidenote: I was 16, he was 17) and you're stuck in a dorm eating suck-ass food you tend to come up with odd ways to pass the time... ;-)
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Lends a whole new meaning to ``shit or get off the toilet!'' I don't think you'd have too many poeple sleeping in public restrooms after receiving ~110+ V to the ass...
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX
"But clearly, the initial database opens the door to all kinds of possibilities, much like the initial mapping of the human genome has opened up huge new areas in the realm of biotechnology." If this toilet DB thing develops in the same way the HGP and other genome initiatives have, it's just a matter of time before some patent-squatter patents "an island-based mechanism for instant bowel relief, complete with a method for localizing such a device in the proximity", and then we're REALLY in deep shit.
Amusing as toilet humour is, the initiative under discussion here is in reality very welcome, and a further example of best practise. Albeit government tends to be a distributed hierarchical kind of an animal, it should be capable of arranging its information asset to that they can be joined together and turned into a resource useful to its citizens. This application achieves that aim. Other governments are doing similar things - such as UK Government's proposed Inforoute system, which will draw together sources of published government information. My view is that Australia steals a march on the rest of us by providing something of immediate practical use to all of its citizens, where the UK application will be appreciated by a small minority os citizens.
A final point. The toilet application verges on a mindset which thinks in terms of publishing everything by default, and restricting on a case by case basis. Certainly in the UK, the mindset still seems fixed on restricting by default, and publishing only on a case by case basis.
Oz may not suck quite as much as you think.
This is a very nice idea, IMHO, and a very practical one, but the thing is, why stop at toilets? Why not have a similar database of grocery shops, hospitals, drugstores and anything else you can think of? I know that in the Us at least, it would be a great idea if somebody could come up with a database of Marsh, Walmart, Cosco and what not...imagine how useful that would be! And I doubt it would be that hard to comppile either. Just my two cents.... On a totally insane note, can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?:)
Did you hear about the mathematician who named his dog Cauchy because it left a residue at every pole?
We have these toilets around the center of Sydney that are self cleaning, and have a sterile female voice in a variety of languages on instructions on how to use it. I guess an olympic spin-off.
If these are networked to ask for more detergent, paper etc, i'd think twice about using them. I'd hate to be hacked whilst enjoying some timeout, suddenly your all wet from the self cleaning, and the door fly's open to the public outside!
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
when you're equipped with this!!
No more stinking closet-size restrooms. And this one's got shock absorbers AND a radio.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
Also found urinal.net via memepool
"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams". Elias Canetti
Which direction does it flush south of the equator? Clockwise or counterclockwise?
Oh, wait, make that 12993 in Sydney. I do remember finding a public toilet out in Long Reach.
Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Toilets need there own IP addresses so that we can ping them and see if they are up...of course it is sad that Mr. Muuss won't get to see the pingable toilets, but I am sure he would be happy to know how far his "1,000 line hack" has gone.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I am sure there are geeky ones like those futuristic toliets in The Sims game [grin]. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
MWAHAHAHA!! Imagine making MRTG graphs of load average ( EWWWW!!!:) )!
:) :) - red shitters means overflow! :) and speaking of which - that'd give a whole new (and messy in the same time) meaning to "buffer overflow" :)
.au t0ilettes" :) and a brand new kick-start to pr0n sitez: "Direct link from your very next shitter"
It'd be fun to administer them with HP-OV
How about skript-kiddiez - having a "How-To r00t
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As much as we cajole the Australians for their backwards-looking regulations from time to time, you have to hand it to them: we in the US would've never thought of this innovation in government. (Who can argue that government is no longer relevent with such pioneering efforts in the world around us?) But I (like many of my colleagues) fear that the US (beholden to our written constitution) may be too slow to close the gap in this new "Toilet Race".
In order to speed the process of toilet locating, every citizen must be equipped with a swallowable camera. Once all the cameras have been deposited, it will be a simple matter of "looking around" and the project will complete itself. Forty years ago, JFK sacrificed his life to ensure that we would not lose the space race to the Russians. We must not be any less dilligent in our own time.
-- Anne Marie
"Surprisingly, more than 99 percent of the local councils responded. While the company has yet to finalize its tally, it now believes there are as many as 13,000 public toilets in the country, or 4.4 per square mile."
Considering Australia is 90% desert, I don't think this quite holds true... what's more, we don't have miles, we have kilometers(!).
A couple of other useful statistics could include:
- Occupancy rate (% change its occupied when you need to go).
- Cleanliness factor (Maybe you don't need to go THAT badly after all...)
- Graffiti rating (how much interesting reading material is provided to pass the time).
(Hmmm, Does that mean we have to do away with our wonderful "Last Aussie Dunny for 350kms" signs?)
I wonder if there is a public-toilet Web ring?
There used to be, but since they installed Tidy Bowl software on most of the routers, it's much less of a problem.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Mildly tangental to the story at, er, hand:
At the last place I worked, we printed out two signs for the guy's restrooms. The one over the shitter said "Core Dump", the one over the pisser said "Pointer Error, Memory Leak".
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX