Researchers have come up with two new urinal designs to prevent the spillage of “ill-aimed pee.”
And I know the employee bathroom where you can find it.
The waste (╯°□°）╯
DOGE needs to fix this.
The researchers suggest that if Nautilus was to replace the 56 million urinals across the U.S., around 1 million liters of urine would be prevented from being splashed onto the floor every day. Assuming that the volume of water needed to clean up spilled urine is about 10 times that of the volume of urine, about 10 million liters (2,199,692 gallons) of fresh water could be saved every day, the scientists said.
The widespread adoption of these urinal designs “would result in considerable conservation of human resources, cost, cleaning chemicals, and water usage, rendering large-scale impacts on modern society by improving sustainability, hygiene, and accessibility,” the researchers wrote.
They should drop everything and do this first thing.
Assuming that the volume of water needed to clean up spilled urine is about 10 times that of the volume of urine, about 10 million liters (2,199,692 gallons) of fresh water could be saved every day, the scientists said.
These scientists appear to be working under the incorrect assumption that the urine gets cleaned…
They’re also assuming the bathroom floors wouldn’t be cleaned regularly if there wasn’t urine on them. I’m pretty sure all buildings with a custodial staff mops the floor everyday, bathrooms twice a day. They’d at most reduce cleaning the bathroom to once daily instead if these urinals we’re absolutely perfect and no other reason for cleaning bathroom floors existed.
Think of what we could be doing with that urine if we actually invested in recapturing it.
Not sure if youre sarcastic or not (I was), but there has actually been research if the nutrients in urine can be used as fertiliser and I believe the result was positive.
Where’s ye goode olde piss channel?
Spilled makes it sound like someone’s clumsily carrying around a barrel of urine throughout public toilets.
Just… Sit down. Shit in the urinal.
Hey, America. If you are going to ignorantly continue to use your obsolete and impractical system of measurement in spite of the rest of the would moving on to an objectively superior system generations ago, could you at least spell litres correctly when you fucking use the word?
Liter us how it’s spelled in American English. Like centre becoming center, fibre to fiber, etc. Language changes, neither is incorrect.
Americans can decide how to spell gallons. They don’t get a say in how to spell litre.
Well, here’s the thing with language, it is whatever people who use the language use. If you can spell litre as liter and it’s widely accepted, welp, liter is a correct and valid form then.
Also, you spell tire as tyre, you lunatics lol
Litre is an international scientific standard. It’s spelling is not up for debate. Why don’t you just change It’s volume as well, and completely fuck up all scientific communication while your at it.
If we’re talking about the order the sounds are made, “liter” is more correct. I never understood why Europeans spell the “er” sound as “re”. It’s just now how the sound works.
My take is that spelling should reflect the sound. In any language. For every word, every time.
American English makes a ton of errors in this regard, you’ll get no argument from me there (for example any word with “ough” or “augh” is automatically spelled wrong).
I’m sure tons of other examples in pretty much every language make the same mistake. But as far as I can tell, there is no good reason the spelling shouldn’t be a representation of the exact order of sounds that make up the word.
All that to say, even when hearing people who speak all manner of different languages use the word “liter”, not one has ever pronounced it “litre”.
Honestly it should be more like “ledur” for most Americans. We don’t have a habit of the actually making the proper “t” sound very often. But I’m getting into a whole different argument, so I’ll leave that kinda rant for a different time.
You’re wrong for a multitude of reasons but I can’t be arsed to explain all of them in detail
Oddly enough, for as common as the “er” sound is in English, it’s linguistically rare. According to the Linguistics Channel @human1011, the “er” sound is found in less than 1% of the world’s languages, rarer than the click consonants found in some languages in East and Southern Africa.
What’s particularly interesting about the “er” sound in American English is that it functions as a vowel sound. Most of us learned that the vowels in English are a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y, and that’s true as far as written vowels go, but vowel sounds are different. In the word “bird,” the letter “i” is a vowel, but doesn’t make any of the “i” sounds that we learned in school. Instead, the “ir” combine to make the “er” vowel sound. It’s called an r-controlled vowel, and we see it in tons of words like “work,” “were,” “burn,” “skirt,” etc.
In Finnish it isn’t a “litar”, it’s a “litra”, because the r is clearly before the vowel. In Swedish it’s “liter”, and the vowel clearly comes before the r (the pronunciation being different from the English). But in English, especially American English, you guys use the “er” sound and it’s basically a conflation of those two. It’s a very rare sound when compared to all languages, but seeing as English is the lingua franca and a lot of it is in American English…
tldr my point is you’re being quite ethnocentric, unconsciously most likely, as I assume you don’t speak other languages.
What’s so fascinating to me is that, while the “er” vowel sound is super rare in languages as a whole, it happens to be in the two most widely spoken languages, English and Mandarin.
No it’s conscious.
I probably should have said something about it being true with the languages I’ve heard more often.
Things like Spanish, French, Italian… Basically things near where American English came from.
I was and am fully aware that other languages will possibly sound different. The way I said it did sound ignorant though. And with the previous reply, I was assuming they were coming from a European POV. All of that was wrong.
Anyway, add in the “in languages I’ve heard/am familiar with” to that.
I’m aware of the descriptive vs prescriptive concept, but not for linguistics specifically. I’ve got it open in a tab waiting for my next free moment. I’ve spent this one replying.
But you were right to call me out about the order of sounds part. I was assuming a bit. I’m not used to phrasing comments for international audiences 😅. Usually I’m talking to people that would share my perspective and familiarities. In my area I didn’t run into a lot of people that haven’t been from around here. I should get better about this, but changing my own perspective is a challenge. I’m trying.
what a colorful take on spelling. let’s get to the center of this before we find ourselves under gray skys.
I know the flavor of this may be disturbing but the only way we’re canceling this issue is to draft up a plan to fix our dialog.
Most of it is in my bathroom when my father-in-law visits.
They are fixing a problem that has already been solved. There are already urinals that take this into consideration. The problem is not in the design, it is the implementation. For some reason everybody everywhere installs those awful American Standard urinals that are specifically designed to splatter pee onto your pants.
For some reason
$$$
I personally estimate 85% is from the troughs at Fenway.
I’m skeptical about this.
There are like 170M dudes
And say each pee is about 300ml
Then 1 in 50 dudes needs to have a full pee on the floor every day.Ok maybe that’s a bit more believable
It probably includes the nearly microscopic droplets that spray out of the urinal.
Have you ever had to clean public restrooms? Nothing microscopic about the drops of splashback.
I wear shorts, I already know!
I’m also dubious on how the number is arrived at.
5ml per man per day misses target.
If you include the outliers that are incontinent, it makes up for the folks who skip a day or two of floor-pissing.
Lol there’s a sentence I never thought I’d type.
It’s because people stand too far back from the urinal, and then shake it like they are trying to kill it. Get in there, and then finish with a gentle squeeze or two and you won’t splatter everywhere.
Or, instead of that, pee sitting down.
Zero spillage.
Meh then you wasting like 4x the water.
I once saw a road stop urinal that had a step that forced you to get to the right distance. Genius and simple.
Urine Georg,
Where is this bathroom so I can avoid it?
Poor floor
Who the heck has counted this?
