I was watching some kind of home makeover show today and saw a toilet that had a chip in it and a sensor to detect if it was overflowing. It has this big thing hanging over the back side of the bowl that looked like a piece of soap on a wire. If the toilet started to overflow it would hit the bar-of-soap looking thing which would signal a little chip to shut off the water going to your toilette.
Now I am a technology junkie. I love it when electronics can automate any activity that has to be repeated that I don't like to do. For instance, Pela windows makes electronic windows that have build in shades between the layers of glass and motorized opening mechanisms. You can hook them all together on a remote system. This sounds stupid unless you have a living room facing west in the evening and you go to watch a movie. Instead of closing all your blinds etc, you can set it up on your tv remote so that when you choose movie, it turns on all the right pieces of equipment and sets them correctly and it closes the blinds in any of the windows that face the sun and opens windows to cool off the living room (if you were tired of central air). You push one button and get a symphony of automation while you do something else. That is just one shitty example of how cool automation can be.
Companies are building rf chips that can be sewed into clothes so that the clothes can identify themselves to stores when you walk in. If you're a little guy like me and you go walking into a shop that only carries clothes for huge fucking guys then the a little directional speaker will come on that only you can hear and let you know that they don't have any smalls of anything and that they will order some when x amount of small guys walk in. Hell, the targeted audio system could let you pick your own music so you don't have to listen to whatever the shitty music in the store is. The possibilities are endless, and if it is done well, you'll never notice how much is being automated.
Anyway, to get back to my point, the toilet thing is lame as hell. The device that detected the water level was huge and looked out of place. I can't imagine having to clean behind it. It was just so poorly designed that I can't believe people buy it. If there is something I like more than automation it is design that is so good that all the technology in the world can't really improve it.
Toilets are a great example of this kind of technology. They have been around since the mid 1800s using basically the same principles the entire time. They have a little resevoir of water above the actual pot. The resevoire fills until a baloon tied to an arm is lifted high enough by the water to turn off the valve that controls the water. That arm is also tied to the plug at the bottom so once the resevoire drops to a certain point, the plug is allowed to go back into the hole. When you push the lever, it pulls the plug and empties the water into the pot until the water lever gets low at which point the plug falls back into the hole and allows the resevoire to fill again until the little baloon shuts off the water. Gravity does all the work. Even better than that is the way they seal out sewer gas from getting into your house. All they do is put a bend in the pipe and water gets trapped in there which seals off the sewer gas. It is a perfect seal that never wears out and it has no moving parts. Messing with toilets is stupid because you can't beat the simplicity. English style slip leads are something else I have a deep appreciation for. Companies spend thousands on dog collars and leashes; but if you need to train a dog or walk a big dog that gets worked up and roudy in certain situations, you can't beat a slip lead. It's a rope with a metal ring in the end. That fucking rules.
Our parents were the first generation of people that didn't know how everything around them worked. Anymore I think the majority of people have no idea how anything works. If you take a little time to look around though there are some amazing things that people have created over the years and almost all of it is in an effort to automate something tedious. Even the toilet is an example of that. People used to have to carry out their chamber pots in the morning when they got up. Someone got sick of that and eventually created the modern toilet. Anyway, that's all I've got.
Now I am a technology junkie. I love it when electronics can automate any activity that has to be repeated that I don't like to do. For instance, Pela windows makes electronic windows that have build in shades between the layers of glass and motorized opening mechanisms. You can hook them all together on a remote system. This sounds stupid unless you have a living room facing west in the evening and you go to watch a movie. Instead of closing all your blinds etc, you can set it up on your tv remote so that when you choose movie, it turns on all the right pieces of equipment and sets them correctly and it closes the blinds in any of the windows that face the sun and opens windows to cool off the living room (if you were tired of central air). You push one button and get a symphony of automation while you do something else. That is just one shitty example of how cool automation can be.
Companies are building rf chips that can be sewed into clothes so that the clothes can identify themselves to stores when you walk in. If you're a little guy like me and you go walking into a shop that only carries clothes for huge fucking guys then the a little directional speaker will come on that only you can hear and let you know that they don't have any smalls of anything and that they will order some when x amount of small guys walk in. Hell, the targeted audio system could let you pick your own music so you don't have to listen to whatever the shitty music in the store is. The possibilities are endless, and if it is done well, you'll never notice how much is being automated.
Anyway, to get back to my point, the toilet thing is lame as hell. The device that detected the water level was huge and looked out of place. I can't imagine having to clean behind it. It was just so poorly designed that I can't believe people buy it. If there is something I like more than automation it is design that is so good that all the technology in the world can't really improve it.
Toilets are a great example of this kind of technology. They have been around since the mid 1800s using basically the same principles the entire time. They have a little resevoir of water above the actual pot. The resevoire fills until a baloon tied to an arm is lifted high enough by the water to turn off the valve that controls the water. That arm is also tied to the plug at the bottom so once the resevoire drops to a certain point, the plug is allowed to go back into the hole. When you push the lever, it pulls the plug and empties the water into the pot until the water lever gets low at which point the plug falls back into the hole and allows the resevoire to fill again until the little baloon shuts off the water. Gravity does all the work. Even better than that is the way they seal out sewer gas from getting into your house. All they do is put a bend in the pipe and water gets trapped in there which seals off the sewer gas. It is a perfect seal that never wears out and it has no moving parts. Messing with toilets is stupid because you can't beat the simplicity. English style slip leads are something else I have a deep appreciation for. Companies spend thousands on dog collars and leashes; but if you need to train a dog or walk a big dog that gets worked up and roudy in certain situations, you can't beat a slip lead. It's a rope with a metal ring in the end. That fucking rules.
Our parents were the first generation of people that didn't know how everything around them worked. Anymore I think the majority of people have no idea how anything works. If you take a little time to look around though there are some amazing things that people have created over the years and almost all of it is in an effort to automate something tedious. Even the toilet is an example of that. People used to have to carry out their chamber pots in the morning when they got up. Someone got sick of that and eventually created the modern toilet. Anyway, that's all I've got.