Blogging for bagels, the Toilet Blog
I arrived to my office a bit earlier than usual today, only to find I had accidentally arrived in time to “blog for bagels”. I moved my main office to a coworking facility called NextSpace in Santa Cruz. Lots of interesting things happen here, including social networking experiments. Margaret, one of the Q-Mamas from Quiddities and Mahesh Grossman, whom I haven’t met yet, decided recently that Thursday was Blogging for Bagels Day at Nextspace. The purpose is to encourage people to blog because most of us that have them just neglect them. It’s also a way for us to get to know each other by sharing our blog posts. Now that’s kinda scary, but I digress.
So today’s blog is about toilets. Why? Well, because I was trying to figure out what I wanted to blog about while my bagel was toasting, and I inevitably ended up in the bathroom where I asked myself – “Do toilets in Austrailia really flush the other way?”. Of course this was planted in my mind several years ago my the great folks over at the Fox Network in an episode of The Simpsons. I thought about a few other things, but I won’t share them here, yet…
So it turns out a French scientist named Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis published some papers in the 1800s based on his experiments with friction and hydraulics. In the 20th century, the phrase Coriolis effect began to be used in relation to meteorology. But we’re talking toilets here, and the Coriolis effect also applies to the draining of bathtubs and toilets. Unfortunately the Coriolis effect is most consistent in large system, so the pop culture reference is mostly a myth.
So there you have it…