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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!
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
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.
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
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?
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.