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What Did Ancient Romans Do Without Toilet Paper?

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Re: What Did Ancient Romans Do Without Toilet Paper?

#281

Post by smallnamespace »

freeflight wrote: post #268
tyingq wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate the details, but disagree strongly with "You get the odor anyway, that difference is quite negligible" . Submerging it in water made a huge difference. Maybe some chemical engineer can confirm my layman observation.

I'm sure submerging it in water makes some difference, but I'm not sure it's really that big of a difference. The odor is there whether submerged or not because the odor doesn't just come from the "product" itself. Considering the kind of odor we are talking about here, I just don't think the difference is really that huge because when it stinks it stinks, and it pretty much always stinks. Tho, how to quantify odor s…

> but I'm not sure it's really that big of a difference

Isn't filtering volatiles through water part of the logic of a water pipe/bong/hookah?

Re: What Did Ancient Romans Do Without Toilet Paper?

#282

Post by Cyph0n »

tyingq wrote: post #272
RbrtM wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know that there are still people out there that program in Perl or Tcl??

Booking.com is mostly Perl and doing gangbusters. Tcl is, for example, the lingua franca for F5 load balancers. I have more examples, but both are far from dead.

Tcl is a household name in the field of EDA tool scripting.

Virtually all software tools designed by Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor include a Tcl REPL/console.

Any task performed in the GUI is actually executed in the REPL, making it easy to replicate a specific flow by just copy/pasting the commands displayed in the REPL into a Tcl script.

To load a script, you simply pass it as an argument when running the software.

Re: What Did Ancient Romans Do Without Toilet Paper?

#283

Post by Turing_Machine »

mysterypie wrote: post #185
__s wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's regulations on minimum gap size (had a client in the industry) https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/26620/why-do-publ...

So the clearance is needed for the footrests found on wheelchairs, and if you make the stall big enough, you don't have to provide the floor gaps. It's interesting that the ADA regulations have become an important factor in design starting in the 1990s, yet I remember that public restrooms have had those floor gaps since much earlier than that. I wonder if the logic went like this: floor gaps have existed since at le…

The gaps underneath also make it way easier to mop the floor, and minimize corners and crevices for gunk to collect in.

Source: was a janitor for a while in my youth.

Re: What Did Ancient Romans Do Without Toilet Paper?

#284

Post by fiter »

toephu2 wrote: post #264
tlb wrote: post #2

My uncle was an engineer for a toilet paper manufacturing plant, that took logs in one end and put TP rolls out the other end. The path was over a mile long. He worked on variable speed electronic drives for the 1000 horsepower motors that turned the machinery. TP illustrates the triumph of civilization: 1000s of people all doing specialized jobs so billions of people can each avoid a daily unpleasantness.

Except TP is not the solution. If a bird pooped on your arm, would you rather use a dry paper towel to clean it off or water?

Soap and water. Never just water alone.

Re: What Did Ancient Romans Do Without Toilet Paper?

#286

Post by soperj »

url00 wrote: post #235

Unrelated to article content: When I try to browse to the site from Lynx, I get 403 forbidden'ed. Can anyone else confirm? Works fine from Firefox Nightly for me. Any thought on why this would be? Are they intentionally blocking non-js enabled web browsers?

Love this. Never quit using Lynx!

Re: What Did Ancient Romans Do Without Toilet Paper?

#287

Post by Turing_Machine »

salgernon wrote: post #90
logfromblammo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lant I have heard that the piss-collection industry still exists, but collecting the urine from portable toilets and extracting human urokinase from it, rather than using it for cleaners, glazes, and flavorings. And, after searching for confirmation, here it is: http://www.toilets.com/Pharm/pharm_production.htm

I'd like to recommend Jim Al-Khalili's excellent "Chemistry a volatile history" BBC documentary. At point point he describes how alchemists were attempting to convert urine to gold (hey, they're both yellow...) and by boiling it down accidentally discovered phosphorous. Ah, detailed on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemistry:_A_Volatile_History

There's also a lot about this in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, including the building and destruction of an 18th century incendiary munitions factory.

Re: What Did Ancient Romans Do Without Toilet Paper?

#288

Post by skosch »

throw7 wrote: post #192
kragen wrote: post #24

When I moved to Argentina, it took me a while to get used to bidets. But now that I'm used to them, I never use toilet paper voluntarily. It leaves your butt still dirty! As someone said, if you got poop on your arm, maybe while changing a diaper, would you wipe it off with a piece of paper and consider it clean? No, not if you're from the mainstream of any developed country. You would use water, soap, and maybe more…

We can buy "adult baby wipes" in u.s. stores now. It's a good compromise.

It's also really wasteful.

Re: What Did Ancient Romans Do Without Toilet Paper?

#289

Post by xienze »

smallnamespace wrote: post #281
freeflight wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure submerging it in water makes some difference, but I'm not sure it's really that big of a difference. The odor is there whether submerged or not because the odor doesn't just come from the "product" itself. Considering the kind of odor we are talking about here, I just don't think the difference is really that huge because when it stinks it stinks, and it pretty much always stinks. Tho, how to quantify odor s…

> but I'm not sure it's really that big of a difference Isn't filtering volatiles through water part of the logic of a water pipe/bong/hookah?

It’s mainly about cooling the smoke.

Re: What Did Ancient Romans Do Without Toilet Paper?

#290

Post by Turing_Machine »

sneak wrote: post #42
kragen wrote: post #24

When I moved to Argentina, it took me a while to get used to bidets. But now that I'm used to them, I never use toilet paper voluntarily. It leaves your butt still dirty! As someone said, if you got poop on your arm, maybe while changing a diaper, would you wipe it off with a piece of paper and consider it clean? No, not if you're from the mainstream of any developed country. You would use water, soap, and maybe more…

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00A0RHSJO/ $35 and installs in 10 mins with included tools on most toilets. I have installed them on every toilet I regularly use and somewhat internally question anyone who uses Amazon and toilets and doesn’t have one. It also now bothers me when I stay in a 5 star hotel in the US and there is no bidet; I have seriously considered installing one of these (and leaving it) in each hotel…

Thanks. Seriously considering buying one.

Others: be sure to read the review by Mercury. It's very funny.

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