Toilet Paper Roll Orientation

I recently attended a birthday party for Wikipedia, which turns ten years old this year. At the party people asked - were you ever surprised to find that a topic has an article on wikipedia about it.

I thought back to the days when I was surprised to find out all the details of how lightsabers work. Those days are long gone though and now I am no longer surprised about the existence of wikipedia articles ... or so I thought. Somebody mentioned an article about Toilet paper orientation, the choice of letting the paper hang down on the toilet side, or up against the wall. I was surprised as well to find that that page is many times longer than the one on toilet paper itself. It has no less than 128 notes, pages of references and even a "further reading" section (in case you wanted to do some more research). It also lists all the notable people with public opinions on the matter.

Just in case I ever become notable, let the record state that I am very much from the "over" camp, but I respect the opinions of the "under" crowd. The reason I feel this way is just because that is the way my family traditionally sets up the TP. But which side of the family is this tradition from?

Lansey and Gellis family members and any other readers out there, please comment! Lets get to the bottom of this, do you orient your toilet paper hanging over or under the roll?

The Toilet made by Apple computers

I'm super excited to bring back the all time favorite "restrooms" tag on the blog to discuss this awesome toilet:

Thats right, the bite of the apple is the small flush... and in case you think that the similarity to the Apple logo is just a coincidence ...you can see below that the brand of toilet is iPhoada which sounds a whole lot like iphone

Euler's toilet function

I was recently reading the Wikipedia article on Euler's totient function, and thought that I couldn't be the only person who initially read it as "Euler's toilet function." A quick Google search later turned up this Wikipedia clone with the key line:

This number lies in the n-th cyclotomic field — and in fact in its real subfield, which is a totally real field of degree over the rational numbers
    ½φ(n)
where φ(n) is Euler's toilet function.

Bingo! Note, this has been fixed on Wikipedia a long time ago. This also highlights the danger, and potential hilarity of Wikipedia clones.

Urinals and Restrooms of the World

We at the Lanseybrothers blog absolutely love restrooms, we just can't talk enough about them. It began two years ago with a simple attempt by Aryeh to explain the concept of a urinal to a our mother. The same week that Aryeh went public about his "Great Urinal Hunt" (which was more of a safari) Eli began to scientifically classify them with more discussion of phylogenies in "Further Studies of the American Urinal." We then expanded the restroom tag with the South American Mysterious Bathroom Implement, urinal placement, strange flushing mechanisms, fixing toilets, and even restroom graphitti.
I would like to continue the tradition now with my research. Not surprisingly I specialize in foreign urinals and restrooms.
We see here the modern French urinal (galoas urinalas)

It is quite different from the common americanas urinalas but rather similar to dominant English urinals (Brittanius urinalas).

Perhaps the taller French version evloved to accommodate lesser aiming ability or possibly just larger variation in heights.

I spotted this rare and old breed of urinals in the basement of an English university building. It belongs to the water closet family of the porcelainas kingdom known as (aquas super.) They are charachterised by the water tank being raised high above the bowl level.


This species, and the whole family of aquas super are almost extinct in America, England and most of Europe but still thriving quite nicely in some other countries; notably Egypt.



More interesting though is the phenotypical differences in the bowl. Observe the small spout of water, controlled by the faucet on the left side of the toliet (or the side of your right hand if you are sitting). This is indeed for wiping . . .
Notice the non-working version of what looks awfully similar to a toilet paper roll holder. I think it is actually a precurser for the more evolved version with toilet paper and no spouty thing.



I'm not sure what to call this species with the spout, please comment if you have any ideas.

Also, I have a graphic photo, of a toilet that is basically a hole in a tiled floor, with no seat to speak of. I would say its too graphic for this blog though I will email the photo to anyone upon request.

Don't flush your hopes and dreams down this toilet

I've been in back in England for about a week now, and I've discovered a major problem facing modern British society. The issue is that the sewage systems in British buildings are not sufficiently robust to provide for the extensive sewige-based disposal needs of the British public. See for yourself in these toilet signs below:

Broken Toilet

I told Aryeh that the toilet in our apartment broke and he asked "how long before you fix it with a hangar"
It was only a few days, but it really wasn't that broken anyway.


Aesthetics Post-Fix


The guts, where you can see whats broken

Foreign and Exotic Urinals

Here at the blog we were first introduced to the American urinal by Aryeh here then the taxonomy was clarified by Eli here. I would like to do my part by classifying a few more exotic urinals. The britanias urinalas clearly classified under urinalas cornu, it is speculated that the ones found in america are actually invasive species escaped from british ships with segregated toilets (restrooms).


A urinal normally found in France, urinalés corné



Nearly extinct, I found this one living in the basement of the University of Leicester, urinalas grosses.


This is a fossilized toilet from Perivel Castle . . . carefull!

Toilets, parking, elevators and airplane wings

Stacy and I just got back from a trip to Israel. I'm busy applying for another graduate school fellowship, so this will be a short post.
First of all, the required funny foreign toilet picture. Check out the strange flushing mechanism:

Gotta love how Israelis park:

Also, I always find it frustrating how elevator floors are labeled in the US. "L," "G," etc. Although there's sometimes a star or something, you never really know which floor to get out at if you want to leave the building. Compare this to this elevator in Israel:

Finally, a really cool picture that I took as we were taking off to come back to NY:

Toilet paper delivery

After their first all-day Sushi picnic at the beach - the Widget corporation needed a special delivery

I actually saw this truck in the parking lot at work. Feel free to comment if you have a better caption idea.

Spreadsheet Template for Sharing Cost Among Friends

My genius friend Daniel Martin-Alarcon (at right) built a masterpiece G-Docs spreadsheet template for splitting costs among friends and/or roommates.

This template is entirely free and editable by the public so go ahead and fill it up Internets! ... but you probably want to make a copy for serious use ...

Here is the link in full textual glory:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsXzBtTq7IoLdEJLMk5veTQtcXh5MTZoQXJZcUtJeUE&usp=sharing

My roommates and I have been using this for about a year – from party supplies to toilet paper – it is ridiculously convenient.

Here is an example: I bought two things, that benefited myself (N1) and my 2 roommates (N2, N3). My "anonymous roomie" bought one thing which benefited all of us.

Here we immediately see who owes money and who is owed. (some names redacted).

If they pay you back, it is logged in the system and it all balances out. The beauty of using this (and why it works so well with long term friends and/or roommates) is that they don't have to actually pay you back directly. Instead they can pay the next electric bill or pay a mutual friend that you owe money to, things will even out (and if they don't you can add colors to highlight scumbag friends).

If you liked this doc - search up Daniel's email address here and thank him for having me post this here, in his own words:

for the greater enlightenment of humanity

Further studies of the American Urinal

Aryeh's field guide to the diversity of American Urinal (americanas urinalas), including related species in the porcelainas americanas family, although very thorough (he included the extremely rare horned urinal [urinalas cornu]) missed a few species. Specifically, urinalas scaphium, which can be found in the Yeshiva University's Pollack Library and Belfer Hall.

This species appears with both automatic (in the library) and manual (in Belfer) flush traits. While it is unclear which of these is the dominant trait, the automatic flush variety are notoriosly moody, and tend to flush with little provocation, so one would hope that it is reccesive. Additionally, unlike its cousins which regularly maintain a small amount of water, this species of Urinal maintains a large volume of water. For these reasons, it is suggested that perhaps this species is the missing link between the larger toilet bowls (americanas standardium) and urinals.

Although Aryeh suspects that sinks (cleanlinus basinium) have a symbiotic relationship with Urinals, it is widely accepted that urinal cakes (crustum urinalas) do in fact maintain this symbiotic relationship.

Finally, there is a species of Urinal that has proliferated in recent years which uses no water at all - the Waterless Urinal (urinalas aqualess) -which lives in more arid climates. However many experts suspect that this species is the result of genetic engineering, not a recently discovered native urinal.

#include <aryeh.h>

I was watching Triple X State of The Union the other day, and in one scene there is this stereotypical college guy wearing a sweater and tie (in general looking like the kind of guy who spent most of his freshman year upside down in a garbage can, toilet or any other assorted place he probably didn’t want his head) who is hacking into the Department of Defenses database. They scroll though all the lovely screens of computers that look like they are doing very impressive stuff, and I thought I saw on one of these screens some C code and since I learnt C this year in school I decided to pause it and go back. Well looks good so far it has the necessary stdio.h library and then what’s this a function definition before a there is a function prototype, and why is there a space in the name of that function, also where are alls those variables coming from. Well the story is if I think that scene was funny I wonder what real hackers think about it.

To finish I will leave you with a joke (specifically programmed for programmers)

#include
main ( ) /*gcc compiler doesn’t demand the voids*/
{
printf(“A programmer and his wife come out of a supermarket\n”); /*shocking no bars involved*/
printf(“OUCH!!!”);
printf(“His wife realizes that she forgot to buy something and tells her husband \n”
“to watch the nine bags in their cart. When she comes back out she discovers\nhim messing around with the bags taking them out of the basket then putting\n\ them back in. She asks him what he is doing and he told her that he lost one\nof their bags, he then proceeded to count them 0,1,2,3…”);
}

/*This program was written by Aryeh Lansey on 12/13/2005 and is copyrighted and all that other legal stuff, so if you steal it we will have to kill you!!!*/