What comes up when you flush

On the other hand it's interesting not just to see water particles flying through the room but perhaps also where they are coming from. If you design a toilet that sucks everything out first (without a splash) and the rapidly replenishes the water (in a splashy fashion), the percentage of pathogens might be much lower.

And they never have a lid you can close to avoid the spray.

>Žižek on toilets. Slavoj Žižek during an architecture congress in Pamplona, Spain.

>The German toilets, the old kind -- now they are disappearing, but you still find them. It's the opposite. The hole is in front, so that when you produce excrement, they are displayed in the back, they don't disappear in water. This is the German ritual, you know? Use it every morning. Sniff, inspect your shits for traces of illness. It's high Hermeneutic. I think the original meaning of Hermeneutic may be this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics

>Hermeneutics (/ˌhɜːrməˈnjuːtɪks/)[1] is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. Hermeneutics is more than interpretive principles or methods we resort to when immediate comprehension fails. Rather, hermeneutics is the art of understanding and of making oneself understood.

>“In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. [...] It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. [...] The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.” -Slavoj Žižek

They also seem to flush a lot more violently than residential toilets, relevant to the issue raised by TFA.

It is strange to me that there are two parallel systems. I imagine the commercial ones require less maintenance but are more expensive?

No lids. In many places the law requires weird U-shaped open seats. Paid toilets are verboten in most places, too. And the cubicles of public toilets typically don't got all the way to the floor nor ceiling and even have vertical slits to peek.

You can often tell these people without ever sharing a lavatory with them - they'll joke about the woman/women in their life training them to 'put the seat down' (or similar from the female perspective) - as if that's all there is to put down, and consequently the women using it have nothing to close.

(It sounds like a weirdly niche thing to joke about, but for some reason it seems to be popular. I suppose such people think it's very relatable, not realising how exposing or even class-determining it is.)

You pee on a metal sheet? Fascinating. Does nobody wear shorts in Sweden? ;-)

What is wrong with all of you?

> Researchers have known for over 60 years that when a toilet is flushed, solids and liquids go down as designed, but tiny, invisible particles are also released into the air.

Do we need to come up with something new? What if we start closing the lid that is already there before flushing?

I’d assumed it was some standard pro camping kit. By no amount of searching just now has been able to turn up a device like I’m trying to describe!

You don't need to do this. Just sit, it's cleaner and healthier :-)

This general concept is definitely something for us to consider but this isn't a specific case we need to worry about, I think.

Human spaceflights at altitudes beyond significant atmospheric drag would need another solution, but we haven't done any of those since 1972.

No toilet except those found in airplanes can actually suck things down without first having water come in from the top. The sucking action is created by water entering the bowl and coming over the top of the trap, and the water exiting down the drain then creates a vacuum that sucks the remaining water down.

High-pressure toilets simply create more pressure at the top, they don't do any suction first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu2psmj1whE

> Researchers have known for over 60 years that when a toilet is flushed, solids and liquids go down as designed, but tiny, invisible particles are also released into the air. Previous studies have used scientific instruments to detect the presence of these airborne particles above flushed toilets and shown that larger ones can land on surrounding surfaces, but until now, no one understood what these plumes looked like or how the particles got there.