Remember kids, when making graffiti, always cite your sources.
On the bathroom stall:
Here I sit all broken hearted,
Came to shit and only farted.
Then one day, just by chance,
Tried to fart and shat my pants.
- Anonymous
It looks like a mouth, it needs eyes.
And some lipstick.
Disgusting!
The hand dryers that promise you bacon are LYING BASTARDS!
Just keep your hands there long enough
You must become the bacon you wish to see in the world
Include the publishing year in your reference.
My vandals get a zero if they don’t use MLA citation.
That’ll cost them two points off their grade on the paper, shame
Good time to share How to use one paper towel (to thoroughly dry your hands in a public restroom).
Shake. Fold. It really does work.
that was a nice watch, but more times than not I just use my pants
I try to use your pants too, but you walk really fast.
Eyyy I love this guy!
Glad you posted it, this dude is oddly compelling! One of the few talks I remember and actually act on regularly…
Can’t watch at the moment; is this the guy who says to shake 7 times before you dry?
12, but I do 7 or 8 usually.
And yes.
Why 12?
Why 12? 12 apostles. 12 tribes. 12 zodiac signs. 12 months. The one I like the best it’s the biggest number with one syllable.
It’s also a superior highly composite number, which is a lot of words to say it has many factors. That means it can be divided easily.
It just gets a lot of water drops off your hands and the air drying helps
Is it also the guy who ends with the joke that his next talk will be how to do the same with toiletpaper?
The next person in line breathing in your neck dries your neck as an added bonus!
Funnily, that’s not really true. Such studies showing that exist but are sponsored by… paper towel companies
Fucking dystopian late stage capitalism… Every fact is not actually a fact cause it’s sponsored by corporate interests
Half the words are automatically capitalized when I text. Because they’re part of a corporation’s name.
I tell my phone to “Remove Suggestion” on that every time, but it never fucking takes and it pisses me off. Don’t capitalist twitter or god.
Yes, and the ones that show air dryers to be healthier are funded by… hand dryer manufacturers.
Someone should fund independent research.
I went for a whole month drying my hands with only independent research and the results were similar to using paper towels.
I remember someone tested this, and the bacteria was found in a wider area.
Either way bacteria is everywhere and we got immune systems.
But then how do I make money?
You make money?
I particularly hate those airblade things even more than regular air dryers. I like that they’re faster and typically not as gross and warm but they are designed in a way where you feed your hand in to a narrow gap with powerful air jets in front of and behind your hands in this gap. Your hands are not a completely uniform symmetrical shape, so the jets buffet your hand around and they inevitably touch the parts of the device where the jets are located, right where everyone else has had the same thing happen. It grosses me out.
And also incredibly loud too.
And they don’t dry as well, and the air moves faster so whatever is living in the water drops on your hands (depending really on how thoroughly you wash your hands) gets flung further, spread better in the space
Yeah after the first two times trying to use them and my hands got blown into one of the sides i said fuck it, I’ll use my shirt if no paper towels are available.
Japan doesn’t have paper towels or air dryers in their bathrooms.
Why?
Because everyone carries a handkerchief to dry their hands. They even sell them at airports when you land.
I’ve been trying to bring back the handkerchief in the States, but not as many places sell them
Yet, the best hand dryers are still your trousers
Zero waste and zero bacteria spread, truly perfect.
Denim is naturally anti-microbial
TIL
Pants dry, trees die!
Is this true? Seriously curious.
Unfortunately it is very much true.
Edit: here’s a more recent source.
This is not hot air though, so the cited source does not apply.
Edit: but it does link to more relevant study towards the end, comparing different means of hand drying.
You’re right and I linked a fairly old study. I’ve edited my comment to add a more recent source.
Kudos.
Findings: Air bacterial counts in close proximity to hand drying were 4.5-fold higher for the jet air dryer (70.7 cfu) compared with the warm air dryer (15.7 cfu) (P=0.001), and 27-fold higher compared with use of paper towels (2.6 cfu) (P<0.001).* Airborne counts were also significantly different during use of towel drying versus warm air dryer (P=0.001). A similar pattern was seen for bacterial counts at 1m away. Visualization experiments demonstrated that the jet air dryer caused the most droplet dispersal.
Isn’t the point to get bacteria off your hands? Isn’t it better to have them in the air than on your hands?
It’s a lot more likely I’ll eat something I touched than something that’s been sitting in bathroom air.
They used a jet air dryer, those are the shitty ones that spray everything everywhere. Of course it’ll be worse. I’d like to see how a dyson air blade hold up under that kind of test.
Why are there germs on your hands right after washing them? Didn’t mythbusters already test it and concluded that they are only bad when people don’t really wash their hands.
Yes.
The followup question is “how many people think getting their hands wet without soap is sufficient hand-washing” and the answer is not terribly comforting.
that they are only bad when people don’t really wash their hands.
Well, yes.
Do you ever watch people wash their hands? Many wet them then dry them. A few rub a little soap around them. Nearly no one does the full hand wash method recommended by health organisations (where each finger is individually washed)
To be fair they probably didn’t rub each individual finger over their disgusting body parts while in the toilet.
I’ll just leave this here:
Hygiene associated with the product has been questioned in research by the University of Westminster Trade Group, London and sponsored by the paper towel industry the European Tissue Symposium
It’s ok to be cautious, but if the data is accurate then it doesn’t matter much.
Also, how is their research any worse than the one sponsored by Dyson, who is trying to sell overpriced hand dryers.
Anyone who has ever seen one of these more than a few weeks old knows how disgusting they get because cleaning crews were never trained to clean them. I’m assuming that isn’t considered in Dyson’s version of the research at all. There’s one in a bathroom in my area that is covered in mold.
In both cases, it is the instance of conflict of interest and a moral hazard. Tainted and not to be trusted.
They always look clean in the malls I see them in.
That’s great, probably better for life happiness to just not look very closely, and ignore research like this. I doubt anyone is getting sick, even if it is certainly spraying stuff around.
Actual science is always good, but I’d like to see data on them with hourly vs daily vs weekly vs monthly washroom cleaning, and the same data on regular hand dryers and as well as paper towel.
Bet the airblades are best with a quick cleaning cycle, and worst with a slow cleaning cycle (except for paper towel if the cleaning cycle is slow enough; ‘no paper towel, dry your hands on what you can’ is certainly the least best option)
I just wish people would know how to use paper towels so that they don’t end up wasting huge piles of them for nothing. 1 sheet is enough. You don’t need 5. Do it like this:
- After washing your hands, brush excess water off each hand using your other hand. Your hands should not be dripping wet when you reach for the paper towel.
- Take a single paper towel. Don’t scrunch it up, and don’t just clasp the towel. Use all parts of the paper towel to deliberately wipe your hands. The paper towels are quite absorbent. They don’t need to be 100% dry to remove the water from your hands.
The end. If you do this, your hands will not be wet. You will not need a second paper towel.
You missed something. You gotta fold the paper in half. The capillary action will trap more water in between the folded halves than it could unfolded.
The Shake & Fold method. There was a Ted Talk!
I mean if you need two or three, that’s still way better than grabbing 20.
Yea, wouldn’t want to use 2 sheets. Not like that stuff grows on trees.
Funny joke. But yeah, the creation, distribution, and disposal are not free - even if they are created from trees. Using two sheets isn’t a big deal, but why use double what you need?
Anyway, I’m not trying to say we need to be super-frugal with our paper towels. I’m really talking about people who just keep grabbing more and more of them until their hands are dry. I’m sure we’ve all seen bins overflowing with barely-used paper towels. We don’t need that.
This has been debunked btw. Fwiw, there is a huge behind the scenes fight between big towel and big airblow.
I’m not kidding. But basically drying via air is much more hygienic in actuality.
As long as you use soap at the very least. How can you blow germs around if you just killed most of them?
Trouble is a lot of people are gross and will do the wroom wroom to make people think they washed their hands, or just wash poorly in the first place.
My biggest issue is the decibel level. I can hear, for now, but the decibel level on those things makes one of my ears feel like it’s being blasted out of my skull and induces ringing.
I use the paper because it doesn’t hurt my ear.
Yes, I’ve seen a doctor, it simply is what it is and my only recourse for that ear is to wear ear protection. In any public restroom, apparently.
My daughter is extremely noise sensitive and can’t handle the noise of those either. After a really rough 2 hour drive involving 3 gas station stops because she refused to even try to use one due to the auto-flushing toilet my wife suggested “making an app to track public bathrooms with air dryers and autoflushing toilets” and I’ve been debating if I want to start tagging every public bathroom I visit on Open Street Map with the toilet flush mechanism and existence of air dryers. And if i did so I’d probably also mark what changing table amenities are available and if there’s more/less changing table amenities in the womens’ or mens’ rooms.
Time to get some good noise cancelling headphones for your daughter
I would use that app.
Can you use osm to do that? How do I mark free parking spots and street parking spots as well?
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:fee
Seems to cover what you’re asking about. Found it from here if you want to see some people discussing it for some context.
You can buy boxes of moldable foam earplugs which can do very well for noise blocking. Individually wrapped in pairs. They carry well in a back pocket. Those work if you’re ok with the sensation of something in your ears, don’t have ear tubes, or some other contraindicated condition.
An aesthetically pleasing pair of full muffs can also work. Sometimes kids need their environment dimmed, and the muffs can work rather well.
We actually already have hearing protection headphones for the kids, but they’re bulky and I usually don’t want to risk them getting messed up in the bathroom on a trip
We try to balance both giving her the tools to be successful but also not having her entirely rely on the hearing protection as a crutch
They absolutely are loud. I avoir them as much as possible even though I don’t have ear issues (yet, I gguess)
Are you calling the air powered piss blasters gross?
Pneumatic urinator