I never use urinals. Not enough privacy. Now if only they’d get the stalls with the doors that go all the way to the floor.
And I’m so glad to hear it’s not uncommon to have the “bi-directional peeing” thing going on once in a while.
Here’s Cecil’s quote regarding the parabolic shape of the American Standard urinals:
I think he’s mis-interpreted things a bit (or the American Standard guy mis-explained it a bit). If the shape is a parabola, and if you are standing at the focus, and if you happen to be peeing ball bearings, then if you pivot and pee in any direction, each ball bearing should fly straight out of the urinal, on a trajectory perpendicular to the wall.
Think of the urinal as the reflector of a flashlight, and your business is the lightbulb, and the ball bearings are the beams of light. The lightbulb throws light in all directions, but the parabolic mirror aligns it so it’s all shooting straight out of the flashlight.
So I think it’s more likely that the focus of the urinal is inside the urinal, within the bowl. That way, it works like a flashlight in reverse (or like a satellite dish). It doesn’t matter how you “pan” right or left (not pivoting, but just moving laterally), as long as you pee straight into the urinal. When the ball bearings hit the wall of the urinal they’re deflected toward the focus in the bowl of the urinal.
(I just took a look at the A.S. urinal in the restroom at my workplace, and I’m not really sure where the focus is. Someone also asked me who I was talking to.)
Of course, all of this is sort-of moot, since only the manliest of men pee ball bearings. The more important point (see Cecil’s quote above) is to pee at an oblique angle (the more oblique the better, I’d guess), to get the laminar effect, which minimizes splash-back.
A lot of women always complain about guys not sitting down. One of the reasons is that if a guy has an erection, for instance when he first gets up in the morning, it becomes impossible to pee sitting down. Especially since, unlike public toilets, home toilets have seats that go all the way around, including in front. Why do the seats go all the way around? All toilets should have U-shaped seats.
One variable here is the different toilet designs for domestic fittings. In Australia at least the bowl is deep with a minimum of water at the bottom. There is plenty of porcelain to aim at, at the rear, and no-one ever spashes (except for the split-stream effect mentioned earlier).
In the US they seem to be low and shallow with the water alarmingly close to the rim; one’s fingers dip into the water (et al) appallingly often while wiping. Then when you flush the whole mess spins round several times before being sucked down, far worse a view than the European step phenomenon. There is precious little porcelain above the water to hit.
Not impossible, but certainly awkward. That particular pee, first in the morning with full erection is usually so powerful it is the only one guaranteed to splash back.
This would be nice at home, BUT, I have noticed that my 5 and 7 yr old daughters get cold porcelain under at least one cheek, the little one, both cheeks. They just don’t GET that you shouldn’t be touching dirty porcelain toilet bowls.
No. If the source of fluid is at the focus, then the resulting streams will all be parallel to the axis of the paraboloid. Everyone here is assuming that the axis is perpendicular to the wall, which would indeed be phenomenally stupid. But if you make the axis vertical, or nearly so, then all splashes will be straight down, into the urinal.
Amusing annecdote, by the way: Last summer, I, my mother, and a female cousin all flew through JFK airport, and had occasion to use the facilities. I noticed the fly painted in each urinal, and being a guy, of course, immediately divined its purpose, and admired the genius in putting them there. When I came out and told the other two about this marvelous idea I had just seen implemented, they hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. It took about five minutes to explain to them why putting a fly in the urinals was such a stroke of genius.
And QuasiQubit, why would an old German word have a Latin origin? There’s nothing wrong with the obvious explanation that “piss” is an onomotopaea. When you make water, what does it sound like? Especially if you’re aiming into a clump of underbrush under a tree, which is a lot older “urinal” than hypothetical ones with decorative butterflies.
Chronos sed:
In that case, “everyone” must include Cecil. Again, from the column:
Under your “vertical axis” theory, it would not look like a parabola when viewed from above (along the axis). The cross-sections would be circular for a “paraboloid” (revolved about the axis) or just straight lines if the parabola was “extruded” along or perpendicular to the wall.
Furthermore, if the axis is vertical, and the apex of the parabola is the bottom of the bowl, then anything hitting the sides would tend to bounce up. Unless you’re trying to suggest that all the urinals in the world are installed upside-down.
If I’m still being dense, then please draw a more detailed mental picture, or an actual picture.
Back when I thought I knew what the parabola looked like, I really didn’t care. But now that I’m confused, I find that I simply must know.
I opened this thread specifically to make the same point as wilbert, which is that a parabola is a lousy shape to use, and that most urinals were designed by people who never ever wore shorts. With a parabola, your stream isn’t always going to be perpendicular to the porcelain surface, but it’s going to be pretty close to it. And I think we can all agree that perpendicular or close to it is the worst angle for your stream to hit.
Some observations that need to be made:
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A stream of urine is not an idealized billiard ball. The angle of incidence does not equal the angle of reflection. In fact, if you hit perpendicular, the splatter seems to go in every direction except straight back at you. The argument that a parabolic reflector can be used to focus a stream of liquid to its focal point is, as far as I can tell, pure bullshit. (and same goes for the claim that a parabolic reflector is a particularly good shape for causing an “oblique” angle of incidence – a simple plane does a better job)
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You want your stream to hit as close to parallel to the surface of the porcelain as possible. This allows the stream to flow along the surface of the porcelain with as little change in its direction as possible. Ideally, you could pee almost straight down while standing really close to the wall. The obvious downside is that you’d be standing in the urinal, possibly touching porcelain with Willy. Luckily, you can get pretty far from the “ideal” angle (say at least 30 degrees) and still cause no splashback.
The best urinals for reducing splashback (in my experience as a frequent bare-legged urinator) are ones with a perfectly flat surface which is parallel to the wall they’re mounted on. Some bars have the multi-player implementation which is a flat stainless steel wall about 5 feet high with a trough at the bottom at floor level. You pee on the wall and it flows quietly down into the trough. My second-best nomination goes to the tall single-player porcelain ones that are sunk into the floor. I remember these from elementary school, and I think they’re what tcdaniel is talking about. I assume the reason a lot of places don’t use them is that garbage on the floor gets kicked into them and clogs them up. Leave the design the same and raise them a foot off the floor, I say.
And if the American Standard urinal designers are so confident that they’re reducing splashback, they won’t mind if I come “beta test” their new designs and then ask them to kiss my knees.
alewbail–close but no cigar. The trough along the base of the wall under the urinals is not to catch whatever misses the toilet. It’s not a nod to bad hygeine but a sign of cleanliness. The trough and drain are for the buckets of water they dump on the floor to clean it–and frequently, too (you might have noticed that bathroom floors in Japan are often suspiciously wet, and yet they don’t smell like pee).
ntucker–thank you. I was hoping someone else would notice that urine isn’t made of ball bearings or billiard balls. Liquids don’t behave like solids–would someone who knows more about these things than I (and than all these people who expect urine to bounce elastically) care to confirm my suspicion that the difference is partly due to surface tension? Or is that guess way off?
Two reasons:
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We don’t have to. Many, many women I know are envious of men’s ability to pee standing up (or, I should say, comfortably pee standing up).
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Toilets are too short. This is a Raging Annoyance of mine - I’m 6’2", which is not that tall for guys in countries at first-world nutrition levels. But we’re stuck with industrial standards left over from when everyone was about five feet. For my own apartment, I bought a “handicap” toilet that’s 14" high instead of 12" - makes a huge difference in my comfort (although if I had my druthers, it’d be another inch or two taller still).
My favorite solution is simply to install urinals in home bathrooms - a family I knew in Japan had this and I thought, “why don’t more people do that?” Houses and bathrooms keep getting huger anyway.
First, to “privard”, you must be thinking of a different Japanese restroom than I am. The troughs I’m talking about are about 1/4" deep and rectangular, and they have no drain and no outlet and don’t go anywhere. Of course they get swabbed out whenever the floor gets mopped, but the rest of the time they’re clearly just a receptacle for spillage.
And of course I don’t imagine that pee acts like billiard balls. That was sort-of my point in introducing the ball bearings. The parabola shape as far as I know only makes sense if you are peeing ball bearings (or beams of light, cool!), which few of us do. Unless the parabola has more magical powers that we didn’t learn about in Algebra II. Any fluid dynamics types out there?
For what it’s worth, my favorite anti-splashback strategy is to pee full-force directly into the water, which is kind of counterintuitive. The water foams up, and the foam acts as a pretty good splash arrestor.
Here’s my million-dollar product idea for accuracy and entertainment for the urinal industry:
You know that carnival game where you line up with 4 or 5 competitors to shoot a water pistol at a target that inflates a balloon? Winner gets a prize.
Combine that with a men’s room in a Las Vegas casino and you’ve got something.