Full of sh*t...

So while taking a call of nature at the office, a thought suddenly popped into my head - who's responsible for urinal and toilet design?

By this I don't mean the aesthetic aspects of how they look but rather the functional properties necessary to build a good toilet/urinal.

I'm sure you need someone to think about the physics related to, *ahem*, "movement". What is the falling speed? (Because otherwise you could get a real nasty splash effect.) Does one have to calculate the parabolic function related to the male process of micturation in front of a urinal? (Or is it an intrinsically unsolvable mathematical problem, since they always have that shoot the target/bulls-eye/frog as guidance?)

Then the designer/engineer would have to translate their mathematical calculations into how the toilet/urinal bowl should look. The exact height, width or curvature, etc. I'm sure in the past they thought about what kind of material as well, though these days we all use good ol' incorrodable porcelain (sometimes stainless steel for those trough-style urinals though).

Somehow urinal design tends to be more dynamic than for toilets. A lot of different shapes, sizes, styles and fixture heights. So if anyone wants to pursue further studies in functional toilet design, I suppose urinals are the way to go! More room for experimentation!

Weirdly enough, in Holland, they have these crap bins where there is an elevated plateau where the doo-doo lands and remains until you flush it (as oppossed to the kind where there is direct deposition into the aqueous environment that everyone else in the world uses). A Dutch friend once told me it's because Dutch people used to be concerned about having tapeworms in their bellies so checking your own stool samples for larvae was a means of finding out if you had them. But, with modern standards of sanitation, shouldn't they have stopped obssessing by now!? Why do they still design them this way!?!?

I'm pretty darned sure there must be people out there today who have "toilet physicist" or "toilet engineer" on their business cards (who probably have a hard time explaining what they do at dinner parties). And what a mighty great service those men and women are doing for the rest of society.

They're figuring all this stuff out so we don't have to sit on it to think about it. Instead, we can just read our magazines.