> After five minutes of that, the machine would then fill the chamber with hot water for a three-minute ultrasonic bath. This was followed by a two-minute hot rinse cycle. Next, the chamber would drain and the user was blasted with warm air to dry off. They were additionally exposed to both infrared and ultraviolet light to kill germs. All in all, it was a 15-minute cycle.
It's apparently also a tanning booth.
15 minutes means it takes about 3 times longer than a shower, and it doesn't seem to do your hair.
Depends on how much hair the man still have... some will definitely not do it in 2 minutes. And most women I know don't need 15 minutes to wash their hair.
You are right that for able bodied people it's at best a gimmick. But it might be useful for people with limited mobility, who don't want to depend on other people washing them.
Yes, the original prototype is obviously just there to show off the models. I was thinking about more practical and less sexy versions that might actually see production.
I suppose, one advantage would be that you can use it while almost asleep, while you need a minimum of mental presence for a shower. So if you wanted, you could: wake up; slump into the bathroom and into this thing; press the button; snooze another 15 minutes while part of your morning routine is being done for (or to) you.
Whether this is something you should do is another question...
(Also, it might be possible to extend it with hair washing if you mount one of those barber sinks at the top and then somehow automate it. Exercise left for the reader.)
Is that a problem though? The other day I got a whole lecture on HN, complete with math, proving that keeping the water running entire time while showering isn't meaningfully wasteful... I still can't believe it on an emotional level, but the math checks out...
A nominal water aerator limits water around 5L-6L/min levels. For every minute I don't use the water, I spend approximately two full kettles of water.
With every 5L of water I can
- Cook 4 servings (~400 grams) of pasta.
- Brew 5L of tea/coffee
- Water all the plants at home two times.
- Possibly wash most of my handwash-only dishes in one go.
- etc.
So it's not not meaningfully wasteful. However, I can't turn off the water in the winter, because I feel very cold otherwise. However, this doesn't mean I don't waste any water or happy about what I'm doing. My only (half) relief is this water is somehow processed and reused by city for other needs, at least one more time.
Water is by far the most abundant resource on the planet (70+% of earth is water), and we have methods to remove salt and contaminants from almost all of it. We can even turn urine into drinking water.
I wouldn’t worry about wasting it. We’ll die from something else long before water becomes an issue.
We're drinking one of the cheapest drinking water in the world, but this doesn't change the reality of sinkholes appearing where we deplete the water in our country.
So, the prices might not be rising that quickly for now, but sinkholes are giving us the warning.
Prices don't always point correctly, esp. when there are other economic and socioeconomic factors at play.
Was that about water, or about energy spent on heating the water? My gut feeling is that keeping the water running would roughly double the amount of water, so double the energy.
us: the humanity in general, today: the state of world water stress level [0], [1], eligible: the correctness of the thing you are doing regardless of the legality of the thing you're doing.
IOW, "I pay the bill, now get off my lawn" is something you can do. But should you really do it, just because you can do it?
If you think you can do whatever you want regardless of the things you're causing, then we're on a completely different page, and continuing this little chat has no point. We can't converge and agree on a point.
And their public mongodb hacked into 6 months later causing the company to go bust 12 months later. 18 months later there is a Github project that impersonates the server as a workaround.
I'm not sure Paris has one of the best public transit in the world or maybe that's just an indicative of the sorry state of public transit worldwide. I mean I wouldn't call world-class a system where just a single failure easily strands 1 million people halfway to their destination and where trains are delayed and cancelled routinely, often without information given to passengers.
I'm in favor of more public transportation, but if you think people use car willingly in and around Paris, I don't think you've tried it; it's so bad that only people with no viable choice will use a car. Or maybe you could explain (for example) how my sister in law was supposed to carry her two baby kids to the daycare using an overcrowded metro (and bonus, through stations without working elevators) or how my brother was supposed to carry the equipment he was using to constructions sites he was working. And then you've got all the places where taking a car is a 30 min trip vs 2 hours by bus or public transportation (thankfully the Grand Paris initiatives are helping a lot there).
For now, removing cars in Paris just push them around the city, because the public transportation network isn't ready.
Having my children die because someone's poorly maintained octocopter broke down and flew into the side of my home isn't "natural selection against stupidity".
It's like you think the only victims of drunk drivers are the drunks themselves.
"Worse" was not for people in the vehicle but the people below.
After car forced us to be aware of our surrounding when walking, flying car would force us to be aware of the sky too.
Today, we would instead make an app that would matchmake important people, who desire to be effortlessly washed, with less-than-important people, who are willing to wash others for less than a minimum wage. It's sharing (and caring) economy!
We would also call this a "minimum viable product" and promise that in some future update, the less-than-important people involved will be replaced by AI (and become even less important).
> Ah, those beautiful times when people actually cared and believed the future will be better
Thinking the future will be worse with all the available evidence is of a huge ego. How main character you have to be to think that it's just as you're alive that a trend of millenia will inverse.
Technologists' very existence is based on the idea of improvement, and, as a result, making the lives of others better. Compared to other approaches, nothing has delivered quite on the same scale, though it's not without its costs.
Yep, and there's no stopping technological progress. Whoever thinks things will get worse is just being what internet investing lingo calls "gay bears" - waiting for the doom that can justify their constant state of depression and existential dread.
In fact people will get upset if you don't agree with them that the world is going to shit (and prove they are smart by predicting it).
I am not sure about this, but it depends on definition of "technologist". Is Gates or Musk a "technologist"?
I think that social democratic movement in 20th century, and also Chinese communist government, made many people's lives better, by improving their material conditions. It often involved technology, true, but the technology is not much if it's not applied en masse. (Communist government of my home country, Czechoslovakia, had famously huge success in eradicating polio.)
And I am not convinced that free market dispersal of technology is more efficient in providing it en masse than government-directed dispersal. For a striking example, watch the ending of "scientific horror story" from Angela Collier: https://youtu.be/zS7sJJB7BUI?si=rrBJPb6bHASNrPEY&t=2991
Truly remarkable creative thinking in a way that does not exist today. This was a year after humans landed on the Moon, and I can understand the inspiration that drove the 70s.
I don’t think we’ve lost the willingness to test products that push human/mechanical boundaries. I think rather it is about not retreading on the learned boundaries that we’ve already established or “solved”. So now we see concepts that test different kinds of human/machine integration. Such as worn AI devices, headsets, and the future idea of brain chips.
As for automatic washers: The idea isn’t totally gone - enclosed automated pet washers are around. (Despite being clearly terrifying for some pets.)
Came here with the idea of this being about how someone made terrible pre-1970 washing machine UX into something much better. Can’t say I’m disappointed though! I’m wondering if cleaning-intensity ultrasound could cause issues for humans?
>cleaning-intensity ultrasound could cause issues for humans?
Apart from it being loud as fuck? (They say it's ultrasonic, but there's some harmonic around 15,000 Hz that they all exhibit for some reason- both the bucket cleaners and the plaque picks at the dentist's office- and if you can still hear that frequency it is quite unpleasant.)
Most of the cleaning action of this thing is just mechanically being sprayed; I think they threw the ultrasonic cleaning action in just because they could. I'm sure it makes you feel cleaner though.
I think the application for this is to return some dignity and independence to people who have physical trouble washing themselves. Of course the form factor of the 1970 prototype wouldn’t do that, but that can be fixed.
There was a similar (contemporary?) Japanese model shared on here a few days ago, which was basically the same sans ladder. As long as there's nothing to stumble over on your way in, and it's not too hard to get situated in the chair, one of those would be amazing for people with mobility issues.
There was a New Yorker short story I read years ago about an elderly woman in a nursing home, and this wasn't the point of the story at all, but the main thing I remember is how the woman wanted to live with her daughter until her daughter pointed out that assisted/accessible bathing would be impossible in the daughter's tiny apartment shower.
What a condescending and all around horrible way to refer to a whole group of people with a plethora of diverse physical limitations. Reading sentences fragments like this as a disabled person basically ruins my day. Thanks for letting me know that I will never be a part of this world.
As someone reading this while taking a shower, I'm questioning how this could be redesigned to work today. How are you supposed to use your phone if your head is sticking out?
The future of the past looked so much more interesting. Not practical, but certainly interesting.
I'm curious why the author of this piece decided to use the gender neutral pronoun for the women who modelled this odd machine. They wrote:
> The demonstration model would climb into the six-foot-tall machine via ladder, then enter the chamber, with their head sticking out of the top. They'd set the water temperature, then the machine would start spraying them with jets of warm water, like the pre-wash cycle at a car wash.
These models were all women. This was the 1970s, and the photos support the reasonable assumption that this was not a demonstration where male models were used. Using gender neutral pronouns is sensible in many cases — I didn't go as far as to look into the author's biography for example, so I refer to them as they for the nonce — but is doing so when the gender is known (and possibly relevant given the social context of that time) now on the rise, or is this just hypercorrection?
I think it's historically been OK to refer to any person using they/them/their. More recently, even in progressive circles I think, it's still OK as long as you don't have information about the person's preference that would make neutral pronouns offensive to them. Basically, it's fine until you know it's not.
It's true that all the supporting pictures in the article are of women, and you're likely right that all the demonstration models were probably women. But the machine is not gender-specific, the process of using it doesn't seem like it would be gender-specific, and the author was generalizing a series of demonstrations instead of a specific demonstration with a specific model. The subject of the sentences/paragraph you're concerned about - 'the demonstration model' - is itself gender neutral. For all of these reasons I think it makes sense why they/them pronouns were used here. Not strange or controversial at all.
I can't speak for the author, but it can just be easier to just go for a more impersonal tone.
At no point do you need to keep in my the gender of the people and the writing is a lot clearer (the models being women has no impact on the subject, which is the machine, so it's noise in this case)
> the models being women has no impact on the subject
It's part of the context; design doesn't exist in isolation. Was this prototype aimed at women? Was it just sexism or its off-shoot 'sex sells'? Or were there actually male models, but the author isn't mentioning it?
I would also argue that explicitly ignoring the fact that these models were women amounts to erasure, which is probably not intended, but a consequence of doing this.
It was part of a world expo, and from the text we can see it was set as a futuristic vision targeted at anyone that could use the apparatus. The official description also has no focus on the models or who it should be used for in any specific detail.
I get your point on the models all being women, but as that has more to do to the period than the machine itself, it isn't remarkable in itself. It would be like commenting on the show guides being sexy women when discussing Mercedes' prototype at 90s cars. Pointing at the sexism and gender gap doesn't help the subject.
Reminds me of my high school, where the gym showers were a car-wash arrangement, a corridor of sprays through which all the guys were herded nude after gym class.
But if it worked that way (using a small amount of water over and over to clean) would be gross and unsanitary in this case. One could filter it but that costs a lot of energy and changing a filter weekly on your shower pod would not be very green.
It looks like it completely fills and drains that big chamber at least a couple of times. If it were just a sprayer mechanism yeah that could be somewhat water-efficient.
This should have multiple stepper sizes, and I will use the kids' settings regularly for my kids. Yes, I know the security concerns, and I will watch them, talk to them, or read a book while they are being washed.
Our Miele washing machine isn't too bed, if you ever had even a brief look at the manual.
The main annoyance I can find is that it's overly cautious about when it lets you open the door. I guess they take mild annoyance and waiting for the user, over Miele being responsible for major water spills.
I mean, washing isn't some kind of profoundly enjoyable experience, is it? The soaking in hot water is what feels good, and this lets you do that without any of the annoying scrubbing and such.
Edit: the Wikipedia page above says "the ultrasonic action is relatively benign to living tissue but can cause discomfort and skin irritation.". So maybe it was just a gimmick. Ultrasound cleaning was fairly new at the time, so maybe it sounded modern.
Thanks for your contribution to science. On a related topic, I guess there are more than 1 person that tried looking directly into a laser, though. And multiple times.
Back in high school lab I remember we were told not to put our hands into ultrasonic cleaners because it messes with your bones or joints or something like that.
> After five minutes of that, the machine would then fill the chamber with hot water for a three-minute ultrasonic bath. This was followed by a two-minute hot rinse cycle. Next, the chamber would drain and the user was blasted with warm air to dry off. They were additionally exposed to both infrared and ultraviolet light to kill germs. All in all, it was a 15-minute cycle.
It's apparently also a tanning booth.
15 minutes means it takes about 3 times longer than a shower, and it doesn't seem to do your hair.
For a man sure, you can do your hair in 2 minutes. But if you’re a woman it is going to be a multiple of 15 minutes.
I'm a man but washing and using conditioner will take a lot longer than 2 minutes. I have very long hair though.
Depends on how much hair the man still have... some will definitely not do it in 2 minutes. And most women I know don't need 15 minutes to wash their hair.
Let's see: shampoo, rinse, mask, wait 30-60mins, rinse, conditioner, rinse.
Do you think every woman does this regularly without pay? My entire shower takes 8 minutes as a woman.
Of course there are other factors, including biological ones, but yes I agree not every woman does this regularly.
Many do though.
This thing doesn't wash your hair though.
You are right that for able bodied people it's at best a gimmick. But it might be useful for people with limited mobility, who don't want to depend on other people washing them.
Gimmick? Maybe, I’d love to try something like this.It may not save time, but i bet it feels glorious.
Safely getting into and out of it looks very challenging for people with limited mobility.
But the article's final photo is of completely different model - far more accessible, far safer, and for "the health care sector".
Yes, the original prototype is obviously just there to show off the models. I was thinking about more practical and less sexy versions that might actually see production.
I suppose, one advantage would be that you can use it while almost asleep, while you need a minimum of mental presence for a shower. So if you wanted, you could: wake up; slump into the bathroom and into this thing; press the button; snooze another 15 minutes while part of your morning routine is being done for (or to) you.
Whether this is something you should do is another question...
(Also, it might be possible to extend it with hair washing if you mount one of those barber sinks at the top and then somehow automate it. Exercise left for the reader.)
Your vision lacks the ultimate destination: This will replace the bed.
That sounds like that one guy a few years ago who wanted to replace all kitchen cupboards with dishwashers.
Gonna steer clear of those directions. All things in moderation, etc.
Ouch, the germicidal UVC is even more hazardous than the UVA and UVB tanning rays!
And uses orders of magnitude more water
Is that a problem though? The other day I got a whole lecture on HN, complete with math, proving that keeping the water running entire time while showering isn't meaningfully wasteful... I still can't believe it on an emotional level, but the math checks out...
A nominal water aerator limits water around 5L-6L/min levels. For every minute I don't use the water, I spend approximately two full kettles of water.
With every 5L of water I can
So it's not not meaningfully wasteful. However, I can't turn off the water in the winter, because I feel very cold otherwise. However, this doesn't mean I don't waste any water or happy about what I'm doing. My only (half) relief is this water is somehow processed and reused by city for other needs, at least one more time.Water is by far the most abundant resource on the planet (70+% of earth is water), and we have methods to remove salt and contaminants from almost all of it. We can even turn urine into drinking water.
I wouldn’t worry about wasting it. We’ll die from something else long before water becomes an issue.
The water is cheap and plentiful, what's wasteful is heating the water and throwing that away.
The maps, surveys and projections say otherwise, but of course you're free to believe what you believe.
That's the thing, dollars are usually a better indicator, unless something somewhere is burning money to prevent prices from reflecting real scarcity.
We're drinking one of the cheapest drinking water in the world, but this doesn't change the reality of sinkholes appearing where we deplete the water in our country.
So, the prices might not be rising that quickly for now, but sinkholes are giving us the warning.
Prices don't always point correctly, esp. when there are other economic and socioeconomic factors at play.
Well, even if the city doesn't re-use the water, it doesn't just disappear.
Yeah, but getting rid of chemicals and returning it to a non-poisonous state for the nature is a big plus.
You can't dump everything to the soil and say "that's your problem now, nature. Cope!".
> You can't dump everything to the soil and say "that's your problem now, nature. Cope!".
Nature couldn't care less. Nature works on much larger timescales than humans. It's the humans that are impacted.
Just like climate change, plastic, and all other environmental issues -- humans are paying (or will pay) the price, not nature.
Yes, I mean when you are 'wasting water' you are mostly wasting the effort it takes to clean the water. Not the water itself.
As opposed to eg 'wasting petrol', where the petrol really is gone afterwards. At least it has been chemically transformed.
Was that about water, or about energy spent on heating the water? My gut feeling is that keeping the water running would roughly double the amount of water, so double the energy.
Yes, unless you take cold showers.
What's meaningfully wasteful depends entirely where and when you are, and how plentiful water is locally at the moment.
I don't think so. Just because you're not in a water-stressed place doesn't make you eligible to keep taps open 24/7.
This mentality is what brought us to today.
Who is 'us' and what do you mean by 'today'? And what do you mean by 'eligible'?
In most places I've been to, you just pay your water bill, and then you can leave your taps running.
It's about as productive as buying bread just to toss it in the trash, of course.
us: the humanity in general, today: the state of world water stress level [0], [1], eligible: the correctness of the thing you are doing regardless of the legality of the thing you're doing.
IOW, "I pay the bill, now get off my lawn" is something you can do. But should you really do it, just because you can do it?
[0]: https://www.wri.org/data/water-stress-country (This is decade old, we're worse now)
[1]: https://riskfilter.org/water/explore/map
If you think you can do whatever you want regardless of the things you're causing, then we're on a completely different page, and continuing this little chat has no point. We can't converge and agree on a point.
Link?
It doesn’t use any water. It just makes the water dirtier.
Before I clicked through, I was hoping this was going to be about right-to-repair washing machines for clothing.
Instead, it’s a quirky look at the technological optimism of the '70s
Do we have to complain about the title of every single post here?
I'm pretty sure if the automatic mixer/heat adjustment on the shower were to be invented today it would be a subscription add-on.
And it would interrupt the cycle every few minutes with an ad.
And their public mongodb hacked into 6 months later causing the company to go bust 12 months later. 18 months later there is a Github project that impersonates the server as a workaround.
Ah, those beautiful times when people actually cared and believed the future will be better.
I guess this is where Star Trek got the idea of "sonic showers" from?
> those beautiful times when people actually cared and believed the future will be better.
David Graeber has written eloquently about this
https://davidgraeber.org/articles/of-flying-cars-and-the-dec...
Flying car is simply a bad idea, thats why there is none.
Car (for personal transport) is also a bad idea, yet there is plenty of them.
Yes, it's taking ages in order to get ride of thoses in of Paris.
You need to not hurt thoses who are brainwashed by cars and keep taking it despite having one of the best public transit in the world.
I'm not sure Paris has one of the best public transit in the world or maybe that's just an indicative of the sorry state of public transit worldwide. I mean I wouldn't call world-class a system where just a single failure easily strands 1 million people halfway to their destination and where trains are delayed and cancelled routinely, often without information given to passengers.
I'm in favor of more public transportation, but if you think people use car willingly in and around Paris, I don't think you've tried it; it's so bad that only people with no viable choice will use a car. Or maybe you could explain (for example) how my sister in law was supposed to carry her two baby kids to the daycare using an overcrowded metro (and bonus, through stations without working elevators) or how my brother was supposed to carry the equipment he was using to constructions sites he was working. And then you've got all the places where taking a car is a 30 min trip vs 2 hours by bus or public transportation (thankfully the Grand Paris initiatives are helping a lot there).
For now, removing cars in Paris just push them around the city, because the public transportation network isn't ready.
How do people get around Paris when transit employees don't feel like working that day?
Flying cars just look cool in movies and immediately take the scene to the future. Movies don't need to concern themselves with practicality too much.
Exactly why the cybertruck should never have been something more than a concept car.
I disagree entirely. Single person octocopters running autonomously would be awesome.
Catastrophical failure would be way worse.
Flying is less energy efficient. You need to find cheaper and clean energy source.
You need to find a tech that allow to fly quietly.
Forcing to make people walk more is better for the society as a whole.
I'm forced to disagree. Catastrophic failure would be a feature not a bug. "Natural selection against stupidity."
Having my children die because someone's poorly maintained octocopter broke down and flew into the side of my home isn't "natural selection against stupidity".
It's like you think the only victims of drunk drivers are the drunks themselves.
"Worse" was not for people in the vehicle but the people below. After car forced us to be aware of our surrounding when walking, flying car would force us to be aware of the sky too.
Humans have always needed to be aware of their surroundings. Plenty of pedestrians were hit by horse-drawn vehicles before cars were even invented.
Alas, that doesn't really work, if catastrophic failure also harms innocent bystanders.
Interesting article, but jeezum, he could have said the same thing with 1/10 the words. You can skip entire paragraphs and mess nothing.
tl;dr: it all leads to this conclusion: replace "capitalism [with a system that] is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power:.
That's Graeber for you.
"Bullshit Jobs" should have also remained a blog post.
Today, we would instead make an app that would matchmake important people, who desire to be effortlessly washed, with less-than-important people, who are willing to wash others for less than a minimum wage. It's sharing (and caring) economy!
We would also call this a "minimum viable product" and promise that in some future update, the less-than-important people involved will be replaced by AI (and become even less important).
> Ah, those beautiful times when people actually cared and believed the future will be better
Thinking the future will be worse with all the available evidence is of a huge ego. How main character you have to be to think that it's just as you're alive that a trend of millenia will inverse.
Technologists' very existence is based on the idea of improvement, and, as a result, making the lives of others better. Compared to other approaches, nothing has delivered quite on the same scale, though it's not without its costs.
Yep, and there's no stopping technological progress. Whoever thinks things will get worse is just being what internet investing lingo calls "gay bears" - waiting for the doom that can justify their constant state of depression and existential dread.
In fact people will get upset if you don't agree with them that the world is going to shit (and prove they are smart by predicting it).
I am not sure about this, but it depends on definition of "technologist". Is Gates or Musk a "technologist"?
I think that social democratic movement in 20th century, and also Chinese communist government, made many people's lives better, by improving their material conditions. It often involved technology, true, but the technology is not much if it's not applied en masse. (Communist government of my home country, Czechoslovakia, had famously huge success in eradicating polio.)
And I am not convinced that free market dispersal of technology is more efficient in providing it en masse than government-directed dispersal. For a striking example, watch the ending of "scientific horror story" from Angela Collier: https://youtu.be/zS7sJJB7BUI?si=rrBJPb6bHASNrPEY&t=2991
Truly remarkable creative thinking in a way that does not exist today. This was a year after humans landed on the Moon, and I can understand the inspiration that drove the 70s.
I don’t think we’ve lost the willingness to test products that push human/mechanical boundaries. I think rather it is about not retreading on the learned boundaries that we’ve already established or “solved”. So now we see concepts that test different kinds of human/machine integration. Such as worn AI devices, headsets, and the future idea of brain chips.
As for automatic washers: The idea isn’t totally gone - enclosed automated pet washers are around. (Despite being clearly terrifying for some pets.)
we have actual adaptive beds that auto adjust your position, firmness, temperature and fully monitor your sleep to improve it.
But they sure don't have a funky 70s style design, perhaps that's the part that's missing for most people ?
Reminds me the early periods of personal computers.
It’s interesting to consider how our priorities have shifted
Came here with the idea of this being about how someone made terrible pre-1970 washing machine UX into something much better. Can’t say I’m disappointed though! I’m wondering if cleaning-intensity ultrasound could cause issues for humans?
>cleaning-intensity ultrasound could cause issues for humans?
Apart from it being loud as fuck? (They say it's ultrasonic, but there's some harmonic around 15,000 Hz that they all exhibit for some reason- both the bucket cleaners and the plaque picks at the dentist's office- and if you can still hear that frequency it is quite unpleasant.)
Most of the cleaning action of this thing is just mechanically being sprayed; I think they threw the ultrasonic cleaning action in just because they could. I'm sure it makes you feel cleaner though.
I think the application for this is to return some dignity and independence to people who have physical trouble washing themselves. Of course the form factor of the 1970 prototype wouldn’t do that, but that can be fixed.
There was a similar (contemporary?) Japanese model shared on here a few days ago, which was basically the same sans ladder. As long as there's nothing to stumble over on your way in, and it's not too hard to get situated in the chair, one of those would be amazing for people with mobility issues.
There was a New Yorker short story I read years ago about an elderly woman in a nursing home, and this wasn't the point of the story at all, but the main thing I remember is how the woman wanted to live with her daughter until her daughter pointed out that assisted/accessible bathing would be impossible in the daughter's tiny apartment shower.
It fills with (hot) water up to the neck, which feels like a huge risk for unattended disabled people
> unattended disabled people
What a condescending and all around horrible way to refer to a whole group of people with a plethora of diverse physical limitations. Reading sentences fragments like this as a disabled person basically ruins my day. Thanks for letting me know that I will never be a part of this world.
Must be a sad world living in a state of permanent victim hood
I would be mightily surprised if the independence of disabled people were even a thought in the 70s.
As someone reading this while taking a shower, I'm questioning how this could be redesigned to work today. How are you supposed to use your phone if your head is sticking out?
Mount the phone on the top in front of your head. Every day alternate which arm you wash, and which one you scroll with.
How are you browsing HN in the shower?
Beware of the LED!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42259278
You have nothing to fear, if you are recording anyway.
I’d instead like to ask why! “Why is Gamora?”
The future of the past looked so much more interesting. Not practical, but certainly interesting.
I'm curious why the author of this piece decided to use the gender neutral pronoun for the women who modelled this odd machine. They wrote:
> The demonstration model would climb into the six-foot-tall machine via ladder, then enter the chamber, with their head sticking out of the top. They'd set the water temperature, then the machine would start spraying them with jets of warm water, like the pre-wash cycle at a car wash.
These models were all women. This was the 1970s, and the photos support the reasonable assumption that this was not a demonstration where male models were used. Using gender neutral pronouns is sensible in many cases — I didn't go as far as to look into the author's biography for example, so I refer to them as they for the nonce — but is doing so when the gender is known (and possibly relevant given the social context of that time) now on the rise, or is this just hypercorrection?
Hypercorrection.
I think it's historically been OK to refer to any person using they/them/their. More recently, even in progressive circles I think, it's still OK as long as you don't have information about the person's preference that would make neutral pronouns offensive to them. Basically, it's fine until you know it's not.
It's true that all the supporting pictures in the article are of women, and you're likely right that all the demonstration models were probably women. But the machine is not gender-specific, the process of using it doesn't seem like it would be gender-specific, and the author was generalizing a series of demonstrations instead of a specific demonstration with a specific model. The subject of the sentences/paragraph you're concerned about - 'the demonstration model' - is itself gender neutral. For all of these reasons I think it makes sense why they/them pronouns were used here. Not strange or controversial at all.
> gender neutral pronoun
I can't speak for the author, but it can just be easier to just go for a more impersonal tone.
At no point do you need to keep in my the gender of the people and the writing is a lot clearer (the models being women has no impact on the subject, which is the machine, so it's noise in this case)
> the models being women has no impact on the subject
It's part of the context; design doesn't exist in isolation. Was this prototype aimed at women? Was it just sexism or its off-shoot 'sex sells'? Or were there actually male models, but the author isn't mentioning it?
I would also argue that explicitly ignoring the fact that these models were women amounts to erasure, which is probably not intended, but a consequence of doing this.
If we get back to how it was originally presented: https://www.expo70-park.jp/cause/expo/sanyo/
It was part of a world expo, and from the text we can see it was set as a futuristic vision targeted at anyone that could use the apparatus. The official description also has no focus on the models or who it should be used for in any specific detail.
I get your point on the models all being women, but as that has more to do to the period than the machine itself, it isn't remarkable in itself. It would be like commenting on the show guides being sexy women when discussing Mercedes' prototype at 90s cars. Pointing at the sexism and gender gap doesn't help the subject.
I interpreted that sentence as meaning that someone else would set the water temperature?
I don't know if all the models were women, perhaps they had some guys as well? (Or the author just doesn't want to commit, because they don't know?)
We see some pictures of models, but we don't know if those are all the models they had.
Reminds me of my high school, where the gym showers were a car-wash arrangement, a corridor of sprays through which all the guys were herded nude after gym class.
Oh wow, where was this?
If I would have to guess Soviet Russia?
About ten miles from the Pentagon.
It's the robot bath from Roujin Z, but in real life
https://youtu.be/X5i0JU_NsZU?t=464
Yes, that and the start of the 1999 Chinese film shower
https://youtu.be/pxeOQVBLcvM?si=_g0_cHz4LPliGuMR&t=59
How many hundreds of gallons of water for a bath, then? I didn't see that in the story.
If it works anything like a modern dishwasher, it would use less water than a normal bath or shower.
But if it worked that way (using a small amount of water over and over to clean) would be gross and unsanitary in this case. One could filter it but that costs a lot of energy and changing a filter weekly on your shower pod would not be very green.
> But if it worked that way (using a small amount of water over and over to clean) would be gross and unsanitary in this case.
Have you ever taken a bath?
it's not unsanitary on your plates, why should it be on your skin?
Your plates can be washed with temperatures that would scald you and with chemicals that dissolve your skin.
But you don’t want to sanitise your skin, just get the dirt off, so I don’t see any real issues.
And your colon lining if not washed away thoroughly
It looks like it completely fills and drains that big chamber at least a couple of times. If it were just a sprayer mechanism yeah that could be somewhat water-efficient.
It doesn’t matter. Really doesn’t.
We are talking about a device from 50 years ago where concerns were wildly different than the ones today. Water was cheap and plentiful.
This should have multiple stepper sizes, and I will use the kids' settings regularly for my kids. Yes, I know the security concerns, and I will watch them, talk to them, or read a book while they are being washed.
TIL Panasonic bought Sanyo in 2009. We had a lot of Sanyo stuff when I was a kid, presumably because it was cheaper :/
I can see why this didn't catch on, but on the other hand, I kinda want one.
You are in luck. If you attend the Osaka Expo next year. You can see the updated version.
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15482351
Ok im sold
15 minutes and no hair-washing
Before I clicked, I thought it was going to be a washing machine with a three position knob that says “hot wash, cold wash, off”.
modern washing machine UI is terrible.
Our Miele washing machine isn't too bed, if you ever had even a brief look at the manual.
The main annoyance I can find is that it's overly cautious about when it lets you open the door. I guess they take mild annoyance and waiting for the user, over Miele being responsible for major water spills.
On/off would do! Just make delicate 30C all the things. If you need sterilization, use a powder that does that.
30C is a bad choice for colors/dyed fabrics. Cold wash is important.
Never done cold and been OK, but anything I care enough I would take to a professional dry cleaner anyway.
It makes me wonder about maintenance and how users felt about being "washed" in such a detached, mechanical way...
I mean, washing isn't some kind of profoundly enjoyable experience, is it? The soaking in hot water is what feels good, and this lets you do that without any of the annoying scrubbing and such.
What does the ultrasound do?
On solid objects at least (like jewelry) it dislodges particles of grime / dirt. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasonic_cleaning. No idea if this also works on soft tissue.
Edit: the Wikipedia page above says "the ultrasonic action is relatively benign to living tissue but can cause discomfort and skin irritation.". So maybe it was just a gimmick. Ultrasound cleaning was fairly new at the time, so maybe it sounded modern.
Oh, ultrasonics can definitely harm flesh if focused. Yes, I am the guy who tested it with a room humidifier. I knew it would hurt, I did it anyway.
Thanks for your contribution to science. On a related topic, I guess there are more than 1 person that tried looking directly into a laser, though. And multiple times.
And the hair?
I think that's the reason why it didn’t catch on
I'm disappointed. Where's the ashtray?
Back in high school lab I remember we were told not to put our hands into ultrasonic cleaners because it messes with your bones or joints or something like that.
Was that just bullshit?
They probably wanted to keep you from making a mess. (And perhaps also wanted to mess with you.)
It depends on the frequency, intensity, and duration of the ultrasound.
Which probably aren't documented for the ultrasonic cleaners.
Plus "if you don't know, play it safe".
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