Is the Toilet Free?

http://madebymany.com/blog/is-the-toilet-free

by virmundi • 12 years ago

229 122 12 years ago

arbitrage• 12 years ago

That animated background header is making me very motion sick. Ugh.

personZ• 12 years ago

Similarly, on this meta side conversation, the 3D model of a simple box falls in the "because we can, not because we should" category. I scroll with the mouse wheel, and it was captured by that model viewer the moment it scrolled by.

Enjoyable article, though. Sounds like their solution and its optimistic locking may be susceptible to a race condition, however.

Mister_Snuggles6• 12 years ago

Everything beyond the red/green light falls into the "because we can, not because we should" category.

Does anybody really need a menu bar icon to show them the toilet status? Does this company or its employees benefit in any way from toilet occupancy statistics?

Mister_Snuggles6• 12 years ago

Yes.

Do we really need a 4MB animated GIF for this? The fact that they had to host it on Dropbox instead of their own site should have been a hint that it might be overkill.

freehunter• 12 years ago

I'm just wondering where Instagram comes into play. When I try to go back, it tries to go back to Instagram, which instantly puts me back at the site. Why?

benaiah2• 12 years ago

Can we stop with the nitpicking meta bullshit on every freaking article, please? I don't care about the things you dislike about a random webpage. It wasn't submitted because of a header. In order to read the article that we're actually discussing, you have to scroll down to where you can't see it anymore. It's a 10-second-at-most mild irritation. I would understand if it was an epilepsy warning o something, but it's not.

The fact that these comments get made wouldn't be a problem, except that people, since they agree with the complaint (as I happen to do in this case) keep upvoting the damn things. At this point, there's a good 20% chance that any given comment thread is gonna start with the same boring arguments we've had four hundred thousand times on this site already that I have to scroll down past to talk about actual article we're discussing.

These kind of comments are cheap, effortless, and do nothing but degrade the quality of discussion and make participation a PITA for people who want to actually talk about the relevant article instead of random web design complaints.

mikeash2• 12 years ago

Seriously. You have trouble reading the text? Select All, Copy, open your favorite text editor, Paste, read.

This place is called Hacker News, where "Hacker" is supposed to mean that it's a community of people who build interesting things, yet people can't even be bothered to take five seconds to take matters into their own hands when it comes to reading some text. We're power users. Act like it.

Mister_Snuggles6• 12 years ago

This kind of "nitpicking meta bullshit" is valuable feedback to someone, like a startup, who might be marketing a product and hoping to not turn away customers. Sure, this particular thing isn't selling a product, but how many people would be turned away if it was?

Mister_Snuggles6• 12 years ago

I love projects that have a hardware and a software piece like this one does!

The features seem to have gone through a progression based on the hardware available.

The initial thing, a red/green light, could have been done entirely through simple logic built just with transistors and passives. The next iteration, a web-based yes/no, could have been satisfied with an Arduino and Wifi/Ethernet shield, or maybe an Electric Imp. The final phase, tracking duration by toilet, the menu bar helper, etc, requires either some backend infrastructure (if using an Arduino or Electric Imp) or the Raspberry Pi.

The animated header, giant video, and annoying spinning model almost lost me though.

simulate• 12 years ago

Reminds me a bit of the Trojan Room Coffee Pot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot

logikblok• 12 years ago

So good.

falcor84• 12 years ago

Note that the HTCPCP protocol has recently been extended to fully handle teapots (instead of just returning an error) - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7168 I think that adding toilets is a very reasonable next step.

robryk2• 12 years ago

Random Hall (a dorm at MIT) has/had a `bathroom server' that did exactly that and also a `laundry server' that tells you whether the laundry machines are busy. The bathroom server used to be at http://bathroom.mit.edu (seemingly offline now) and the laundry server is at http://laundry.mit.edu

ballpoint• 12 years ago

We desperately need the laundry one in my dorm at Oxford! I have invested way too many brain cycles in thinking about unobtrusive ways of achieving that.

ziedaniel1• 12 years ago

The bathroom server was up until just a few weeks ago. I'll have to ask someone here what happened. (We've had the system for over ten years, I think, so some of the equipment is getting old. )

mrdmnd• 12 years ago

Erons and I (you'll probably not recognize me?) worked on the bathroom server about a year ago - I think the infrastructure is still in place, it might just need to be reconnected.

jaynos• 12 years ago

Laundry server sounds interesting. We just reprogrammed the logic board with a few switches on our laundry to make it free for those in the know and twice as much as the other floors for everyone else (keep the riff raff away). It was a small floor (suites) so all 24 of us on the floor (and a few friends from other floors) had access.

boristhespider• 12 years ago

A commercial laundry server product: http://www.laundryview.com/lvs.php

clarkm• 12 years ago

Which is used in a couple other MIT dorms.

jmharvey3• 12 years ago

I don't know the current status of the bathroom server, but when I was living in Random, certain bathrooms would be taken offline on Jewish days of rest (since activating the door switch could be considered prohibited work). So it's possible that the server is offline today for Passover.

coldpie• 12 years ago

activating the door switch could be considered prohibited work

Unless the operators meant it as a joke, this is absolutely ludicrous.

taejo• 12 years ago

Work during Passover is not prohibited, though.

rdl• 12 years ago

It's also why East Campus had keys (which were great for giving non-residents) instead of the card entry system used on every other building (with keys not being distributed).

(41W)

RRRA• 12 years ago

It was even more practical before the web server when you could just do:

finger @bathroom.mit.edu

(it was still active a few months ago, what's going on! :)

1gn1t10n• 12 years ago

While the hardware part of the job is nicely done, I think there still remains the problem of how to convey the information to the users.

Once a toilet becomes free, everybody waiting will try to aquire the ressource (ie: do a costly walk to the bathroom).

There must already be some gaming theory or performance modelling result that solves this issue, though.

Just a simple idea would be to add a random delay for propagating the information to different users.

cbhl• 12 years ago

One of my friends built software to track use of the two washers and two dryers at our local dormcubator. It relied on students to report that they had started a cycle by email; so long as students did this then the website could tell you when the cycle ended because the machines had fairly consistent cycle times.

While he built a virtual queue into the website (type in your email address and we'll send you an email when the last load is done) it turns out that people are really bad at picking up their laundry right when the machine finishes...

Shivetya• 12 years ago

Just give each stall its own Instant Messenger id so I can check their status via my client

Someone• 12 years ago

That would be a privacy invasion, as users, by polling, could figure out who is on each stall, and, from there, how long everybody spends there. It also allows everybody to recreate the detailed log that this system logs.

I would be careful deploying even the original indicator because of concerns that it might break some employment/privacy law. It is hard to prevent systems from leaking personally identifiable information, especially in cases where data is grouped over a relatively small number of persons, as appears to be the case here.

DanielStraight• 12 years ago

Sounds like the real problem is that you don't have enough toilets.

resu_nimda• 12 years ago

My thoughts exactly. Kudos for geeking out on the problem, but that shouldn't be necessary.

mikeash2• 12 years ago

On the other hand, building new bathrooms or expanding existing ones can be a long and expensive process, so improving the efficiency of existing resources can be a smart way to go.

stormbrew• 12 years ago

Yep. The company I work for built something exactly like this [1] when we were sharing two single stall bathrooms with a floor that, during the day, was occupied by somewhere around 40 people.

And then we moved to an office with multi-stall bathrooms and it wasn't necessary anymore.

[1] http://pee.mover.io -- still up because we gifted it to those left behind (though I don't know if it's still functional).

omarhegazy• 12 years ago

Not an easily solved problem, though, to just up and install new toilets. The only thing you can do at this point is optimize for wait times.

ninjabiscuit5• 12 years ago

Yeah, this has only become a problem in the last few months where we've been growing the company. We don't really have the space to build new toilets, and soon we'll outgrow our beautiful office, partially for this reason. For now I think we're happy to wait occasionally for the loo. As another poster observed, this project was a fun way to improve the waiting experience and make the most of the facilities that we have.

hrktb• 12 years ago

We can hope the logs help to make the problem very concrete and easy to argument.

If you can push numbers about the maximum time someone has to wait before having access to a bathroom, the qualification of the problem could shift from "inconvenient" to a potential health problem.

rasur• 12 years ago

One of the developers at work put an Pi-sized device on one of the toilet stalls, with a page on heroku to show the status of the stall. It worked well, and yes, we do have too few toilets at work.. :(

userbinator3• 12 years ago

Well, there's always this solution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_urine_collection_devic...

command_tab• 12 years ago

Shameless plug: A few co-workers and I hacked together the same thing not too long ago, using an Arduino: http://www.command-tab.com/2013/07/23/gottago/

janj• 12 years ago

I have no experience with hardware. Can someone give some suggestions on where to start if I wanted to do a simple side project like this to gain some experience? Thanks

crusso• 12 years ago

I'd recommend that you not start with the rpi if you have zero experience.

If you're in the USA (edit: at a local RadioShack), you can buy an Arduino, a breadboard, wire, some resistors, switches, and LEDs for less than $60 -- the cost of a typical newly-released video game.

Take it home, read the online getting started guides, and start learning how to get basic circuits working.

Start reading http://hackaday.com/ to get an idea of what's possible. Bookmark projects that look interesting and proceed from there.

bippi• 12 years ago

To add, as a software engineer that knows very little about hardware... the arduino is pretty bulletproof and also dynamic enough to handle very sloppily designed electrical work.

yaddayadda• 12 years ago

I find hackaday inspirational, but not informative enough for newbies.

In no particular order, I suggest:

Check out makezine.com.

Find a local makerspace[1]

Work through tutorials and references for beginners (great hands on electronics book [2], more in-depth info to augment an electronics tutorial [3], arduino [4])

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=makerspace

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Learning-Through-Disc...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electronics-Inventors-Third-...

[4] http://www.amazon.com/Arduino-Workshop-Hands--Introduction-P...

mafuyu• 12 years ago

As others have said, Hack-a-Day is great for inspiration, and MAKE is great for beginners (although falls short once you gain more experience). MAKE has a bunch of great intro books to Arduino, etc. in both paper and eBook form I'd recommend checking out.

I'd recommend buying an Arduino and some basic parts and a breadboard to toy around with. The Arduino.cc Playground (Wiki) has some great resources for interesting projects. You could also buy a MAKE book and an accompanying kit, although the kits tend to be a bit overpriced.

If you're interested in a bit more thorough understanding of electronics, I would recommend checking out the Students Guide to the Art of Electronics. You can find a pdf floating around online and buy the book to support the author (who is an amazing teacher)! It runs through all the basics of analog and digital electronics while keeping it interesting and the math to a bare minimum.

bretr• 12 years ago

reminds me of this: http://www.sanbornmediafactory.com/portfolio_pieces/bum/

design firms love to know when their toilets are free

jgv• 12 years ago

We did something similar last year http://briiiiian.com/bathroom-f-graf/

edw519• 12 years ago

Loved this line:

For now we’ll keep collecting data to see what other worthless knowledge we can assimilate.

On one hand, we want to lighten up and acknowledge that not everything we do is to "save the world".

On the other hand, we shouldn't forget that some of our greatest achievements came from something that seemed worthless at one time.

nlh• 12 years ago

These kind of projects are awesome. They may seem "pointless" or "a waste of time" to some PHB-types but they're a wonderful showcase of a great, true-hacker culture and I bet they do a ton for morale. I hope that any future startup I'm involved with has this sort of culture - it's a goal I'll aim for.

Well done guys.

ahmadss• 12 years ago

shameless plug -- if you like "pointless" projects, check-out Pointless Corporation -- http://www.pointlesscorp.com

jodrellblank• 12 years ago

aortega4• 12 years ago

Raspberry Pi is great and easy to work with. I got it, I don't need 5 inane projects per day to remind me about it.

I particularly like this one, but for me life is too short to waste time in useless projects.

Spittie• 12 years ago

If you're enjoying yourself and having fun, it's not a waste of time.

overgard• 12 years ago

I do always find it funny when some companies say they value "innovation" but look at things like this and think its a "waste". I mean, you can't really be innovative without also encouraging a culture where you can experiment.

jsingleton2• 12 years ago

Nothing is pointless. :)

I wired one of these tasteless gnomes (http://www.robertdyas.co.uk/meerkat-solar-light) up to our build server with a Raspberry Pi (which also plays sound effects). It has to be the most ridiculous thing I have ever claimed expenses for!

Seemed silly at the time but now everyone loves it. No one has to be the guy that tells you that you broke the build. The anger is all directed at the meerkat and you can't ignore it like you ignore emails.

userbinator3• 12 years ago

I think this is not at all a waste of time if it means that employees can be spending more time at their desks and doing work instead of waiting for a toilet. The fact that they were motivated enough to build such a system is an indication that there was a large amount of time spent waiting.

bagels2• 12 years ago

Or that they need more toilets.

fayyazkl• 12 years ago

Moreover, the concept is quite abstract and has many similar applications. I used to work in a scenario when there was a specific gateway resource that was needed to be run by every developer for executing his code, was very expensive and people would annoy each other by suddenly remote logging into machine and disturbing others. Then we came up with a resource locking / waiting and current state showing software, along with estimates of when which machine would be free, so you could request a reserve slot. Some sophistication included things like how much of it was actually used by you vs reservation time so it could adjust appropriately.

VLM• 12 years ago

Seeing zero referenced arrays in the detailed data output warms my heart. Looks like no one likes the middle stall. At current employer, no one uses the first stall because the flush mechanism is partially broken and no one is motivated enough to figure out how to get it fixed. A maint dude could find this data useful to find problems requiring repair.

I will admit that looking at the headline I initially thought this was a geolocation app for urban bathrooms. To discourage the homeless most local retail establishments either supposedly don't have a bathroom or you need to explain to the front desk why you need a key and they need to think your appearance is adequate, or you need to buy something to be allowed entrance into the area at the back of which are the restrooms. This could be useful. Where I live and shop is 20 miles away in a much nicer area, but where I work, if you're out for a walk at lunch time, and you have to go, you pretty much have to use an alley just like the homeless, so an app like this to find the nearest free toilet (free as in don't need reservations and seating at the restaurant, or rented office space, etc) would be occasionally convenient.

stuecclesmxm• 12 years ago

The middle stall is the smallest ;)

dhughes• 12 years ago

It should have a gas alarm on it to at least add 10 minutes after a flush.

zhte415• 12 years ago

I remember, about 25 years ago, a HUD on each an ever train carriage would indicate whether the toilet was occupied. The HUD was located above the baggage section at the end of each carriage. Occupied was red, and unoccupied was blank. No Raspberry Pi was involved, but through careful social engineering, everyone in the carriage know what the sign meant, There was a physical hardware based fall-back also, which was an indicator on the 'toilet room' with not both red but 'OCCUPIED' displayed on the door, the operating process of which consisted of one locking the door.

This is not to discredit train bathroom engineers decades ago. Ensuring a piece of bathroom machinery operates consistently for up to thousands of miles per day with usage analysis certainty included is a very admirable achievement.

Decades later... the same efforts but in a small scale static environmental setting are posted to a website called Hacker News.

icebraining• 12 years ago

I'm not sure what's your point; I'm pretty sure this isn't being upvoted because people consider it an amazing accomplishment, but because it's a fun example of how easy it is to connect physical objects to the Internet using the Pi.

hengheng• 12 years ago

On the other hand, it is /fun/.

T-hawk• 12 years ago

Good observations, but let's also review what this does accomplish. The train system is reliant on mechanical linkage and line-of-sight, so can serve only a limited audience. While the Pi-powered version scales, making the toilet status accessible to everyone everywhere in the world by leveraging the connectivity of the Internet.

rtpg• 12 years ago

While the Pi-powered version scales

It scales but the endpoint probably doesn't scale ( I don't know if 1 toilet can easily serve 100 people)

userbinator3• 12 years ago

Passenger planes have had the same thing too.

ctdavies• 12 years ago

I was totally expecting an article discussing the politics of toilets.

Theodores• 12 years ago

It is easy to mock the OTT solution that has gone on here, however...

I had the pleasure of working with a deaf guy that would spend an inordinate amount of time in the loo. There was just the one loo.

45 minutes could pass by with him occupying the loo. Being deaf it wasn't as if you could knock on the door and ask him to hurry up - he would not be able to hear you, and, even if he could hear you he would be able to pretend otherwise. Like Schrodinger's cat there would be no way of knowing...

You couldn't complain either, for all one knew he might have been using that time for something more important than one's own toiletry needs. Perhaps it was the batteries in his hearing aids, not being deaf one would not know, or even know if speculating about such a thing was morally inconsistent. Or maybe he had another medical condition that one was not privy too. Or maybe his body jewellery needed to have puss and inflammation cleaned out if it on a regular basis. One can only imagine...

It wasn't as if he took the newspaper in or his phone, so it wasn't a really good book or jolly exciting porn collection that took up his time there. None of the micro-managers really thought it a problem that he would spend such a long time in the loo, even if other staff and visitors had to go to a nearby Starbucks due to being caught short.

So we had a 'is the toilet free' messaging system of our own. There would always be euphemisms, it wasn't as if we would message 'finally [x] has finished having a poo and you can now use the loo'. Anyone shoulder surfing our screens would not realise that that messaging conversation in the corner about 'that report being delivered', 'the printer having finished', 'those files uploaded' or 'desperate for that CSV file' was about the status of the loo. However, through such messages, those two floors away from the loo would be able to find out if it really would be possible for them to relieve themselves or not.

In our case, of a small team with inadequate toilet facilities, we really should have moved to a proper modern office with all of those Philips controls in the toilets to know what the occupancy situation is, whether the loo needs to be flushed, whether the water in the hand basin needed to flow and so on. But we were not going to do that. So we had our own system, a system that manager types were not privy to. It worked well for us and it was fun.

Had we gone a bit further, hooked up that free Raspberry Pi nobody knew what to do anything with and implemented something similar, I don't know how it would have panned out. Someone other than the loo-hogger would have been sacked for wasting company time and not prioritising their work, the politics of disability would have got ugly and it would not have happened. So, even though the solution of the Raspberry Pi is OTT, in getting it done and having fun doing it, I think that this team have got something out of it a lot more valuable than their 'Heath Robinson' toilet status indicator.

Personally I like the simple solution they have on older trains - a light that shows 'vacant' or 'occupied'. There is no internet to break down, there is no TCPIP settings to get wrong, just a lightbulb to change and a switch to keep clean. I am sure that for multiple stalls the series/parallel could be worked out for the switches without too much difficulty.

nkozyra2• 12 years ago

Prone to race conditions, unfortunately. What's more frustrating than seeing Yes and then finding the door closing in front of you.

Yhippa• 12 years ago

Maybe they could add a reservation queue to the bathroom as new functionality. That would probably be unnecessary blocking if people abandon their place in line.

stevewilber• 12 years ago

Or try to predict availability based on recent queries. If there is only one stall open and someone checked its status 30s ago, respond that "maybe" a stall is free.

NAFV_P• 12 years ago

Maybe they could add a reservation queue to the bathroom as new functionality.

The FIFO system does not take urgency into account. When making a query, it would be good to give an urgency rating on a scale of 0 to some_number.

nkozyra2• 12 years ago

Maybe the bathroom lock could literally be a mutex.

skelsey• 12 years ago

A queue would only work if everyone used this system. Unfortunately, you will always have visitors or people who don't want to participate.

danielweber• 12 years ago

This website gave me motion sickness. If it's some art project, good on them. If they're trying to communicate information, -1.

josephschmoe• 12 years ago

This is actually immensely useful. Imagine I'm Disney, New York City or the National Parks Service.

This could tell me:

1. Which bathrooms are used and when?

2. Which bathrooms/stalls are being avoided by people?

3. Which bathrooms are out of toilet paper or paper towels?

Could literally save millions of dollars, improve location choices for bathrooms and have way fewer dirty bathrooms. It's the same point as those sensors in garbage bins/dumpsters.

michh• 12 years ago

Add a yellow light for when there are stalls available but all free stalls have recently been used for more than 2 minutes.

So basically, yellow would mean "You could, but unless you really need to, you probably don't want to" ;)

dclowd9901• 12 years ago

Or a yellow light to reserve a stall for the short walk to the bathroom from your desk. Nothing worse than making the B-line to the stall, only to have someone cut you to the chase.

You could make it very simple timer that holds the stall for a brief minute or two.

Dewie• 12 years ago

Oh I get it, you're saying that it would probably smell like shit in there. wink.

nyrina• 12 years ago

I don't know about you, but it always smells heavily of strawberries after I've been there.

golergka• 12 years ago

When I see projects like this, I always remember that that's how webcam was invented.

bcohen5055• 12 years ago

Tie the data in with people's lunch calendars and you can start forcasting peak toilet demand!

yeukhon• 12 years ago

I would even go as far as "booking toilet". Sometimes when you need to take #2 and you absolutely want privacy (because that's a multi-tenant restroom) and isolation, you can pay for the next toilet by "paying". How to pay? Could just be a drink, or say thank you aloud to your coworker. Something fun.

JD557• 12 years ago

Here are some more ideas for you to use the data

* What's the most common pattern for two occupied toilets (from the frequencies, it appears to be the classic occupied-free-occupied, to allow more space between users) * What's the day of the week that the toilets are most used? And less used? (it would also be nice to cross-reference that with the menus from nearby cafeterias) * Check if there's any correlation between the frequency of people going to the toilet and issues on you bug tracker. What about the average duration? * If you extend your system to a coffee machine, correlate the coffee consumption with the toilet's usage.

Actually, with this, you could use most of this data and train a decision tree with it. Then, you could warn your co-workers with "In 10 minutes it is expected that the toilets will be occupied, maybe you want to go now?".

On the other hand, maybe you just want to keep this functionality to yourself, otherwise everyone will just go to the bathroom 10 minutes earlier.

MichaelTieso• 12 years ago

ThoughtBot did something similar with a Arduino. http://robots.thoughtbot.com/arduino-sensor-network

They had done a podcast episode as well on this although I can't remember which episode that was.

jsingleton2• 12 years ago

Love it!

I made something very similar with a Spark Core (https://www.spark.io/), lots of wire, some paper clips, post-it notes and gaffer tape. I should really get round to writing that up. Same single purpose site design (albeit only on our Intranet) but it has mobile apps and desktop notifications. Time for a pull request.

I was inspired by http://www.frisnit.com/telemetry/. Seems like this is a pretty common problem. :)

mikeleeorg• 12 years ago

"For now we’ll keep collecting data to see what other worthless knowledge we can assimilate."

I see what you did there.

I love these kinds of projects though. "Pointless" is only in the eye of the beholder, and if I worked there, I would probably find this pretty useful.

stkni• 12 years ago

Great! But you need a status update that's more mobile I think. Because the status is quite likely to change when you (and all your colleagues) see the green light and head for the door ...

djhworld• 12 years ago

I hope the data that comes from the toilet is inaccessible to anyone until the end of the day.

Otherwise it would be easy to infer from real-time data how long a persons bathroom break is and maybe infer what they were doing in there, which, while obvious, I think people would be uncomfortable with others knowing.

bluerail• 12 years ago

Wow.. How a simple random thought could build into something...

incanus77• 12 years ago

From http://www.npr.org/2012/03/19/148777350/how-creativity-works...:

"[Jobs] insisted there be only two bathrooms in the entire Pixar studios, and that these would be in the central space. And of course this is very inconvenient. No one wants to have to walk 15 minutes to go to the bathroom. And yet Steve insisted that this is the one place everyone has to go every day. And now you can talk to people at Pixar and they all have their 'bathroom story.' They all talk about the great conversation they had while washing their hands.

" ... He wanted there to be mixing. He knew that the human friction makes the sparks, and that when you're talking about a creative endeavor that requires people from different cultures to come together, you have to force them to mix; that our natural tendency is to stay isolated, to talk to people who are just like us, who speak our private languages, who understand our problems. But that's a big mistake. And so his design was to force people to come together even if it was just going to be in the bathroom."

benatkin• 12 years ago

Free as in beer or free as in speech?

mtVessel• 12 years ago

" ... thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for [the loo]." -Douglas Adams

bagels2• 12 years ago

Does your office violate Osha standards for employees per toilet?

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2013-title29-vol5/xml/CFR-2...

threedaymonk2• 12 years ago

Well, theirs doesn't: it falls outside the purview of OSHA via the loophole of not being in the US :-) In fact, the relevant UK legislation is marginally stricter, and permits up to 50 people at work for 3 unisex toilets: http://www.hse.gov.uk/contact/faqs/toilets.htm . That's five fewer than the US Labor Code.

I did note with amusement this line in the US code:

(2) Construction of toilet rooms. (i) Each water closet shall occupy a separate compartment with a door and walls or partitions between fixtures sufficiently high to assure privacy.

US toilets gave me quite a culture shock: the partitions and doors are so short, high off the floor, and full of gaps that they certainly did not "assure privacy", at least not compared to what I'm used to.

jmzbond2• 12 years ago

A little torn about this. Reading through the comments, and kind of agree that the project is an interesting representation of hacker culture, and certainly stimulating/ morale-boosting to work on...

But on the other hand, I'm just a little bit sad that some clearly intelligent people have put time toward this problem instead of pressing issues like hunger or violence or any other number of social problems that are present all over the Valley and the US, not to mention the rest of the world. Secondly, every time I read an article about "using the bathroom for 1 less minute will save in total X years of your life!" I think about Wall-E and how much I don't care for that level of efficiency.

Alright I'll get off my box, because I'm sure this was a harmless and fun post, but this was just an honest statement of what I thought. I wrote about this (i.e., and get up on the soapbox with a loudspeaker) much more in-depth in case anyone is curious (or thinks I'm crazy) FYI: https://medium.com/business-startup-development-and-more/64d...

jmzbond2• 12 years ago

Was the downvote because this opinion, expressed in a hopefully respectful way, was just… not welcome?

antihero• 12 years ago

Your office is absolutely beautiful. I hope one day our company will inhabit a space that nice.

collyw• 12 years ago

I wish I had the type of job that involved enough free time to do something like that.

TomGullen• 12 years ago

Could actually provide life saving information in fire situations

Is the Toilet Free?

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