It just took place in New Delhi. In 2001, Jack Sim founded the World Toilet Organization. He argues that toilets get too little respect, and he’s wishing some celebrities or unicyclists take up the cause. Let’s all meet at the next World Toilet Summit!!! The Toi-Uni Summit! [Absolutely true–google it!]
Billy-
It’s hard to believe that you just “stumble onto” information like this. You must have been intentionally searching for something toilet-related that involves large numbers of invited guests. Either that or you were already on the WTS mailing list to which I exclaim, WTF. Should that be followed by a question mark, an exclamation mark, or both?
Greg,
My good friend, you know I’m only into very mainstream conventional stuff.
I read about this on p. 2 of today’s NYTimes, Week in Review section.
It’s YOUR mind that’s in the toilet. 
PS http://www.worldtoilet.org/ will tell you how many people are without toilets. Imagine.
Billy
Use an interrobang (‽). It’s a clever combination of the question mark and exclamation mark.
Your response to Billy’s curious query would be: WTF‽ (I always pronounce and read that as “What The Foo”).
‽
This thread is now rife with double entendre.
JC,
Why does your interrobang just look like a box on my browser? Do I not have the right font set?
Is it supposed to look like this?:
Wow, there’s an actual Unicode code point for that.
U+203D
Steve – that’s the one. For me, it shows properly in Firefox but not IE.
Let me try it out…
YOU’RE STILL USING IE‽‽‽
I’m using IE 7 right now with Vista. It’s nifty cool.
The interrobang character shows up for me in both IE 7 and Firefox. It also works for me in XP in both browsers.
If you’re getting a box character that means that the font being used doesn’t have the interrobang character. With all the font substitution that can go on when rendering web pages I’m not sure how to change the defaults or the fonts so that the interrobang character will be displayed here.
I’m familiar with the box issue. I’ve been working on some internationalization issues at the software company I work for. A box is a font problem, which means it’s a setup problem, which means that it’s not my problem. A question mark is a translation problem. For example, if somewhere along the line that Unicode character were translated to a code page (such as an ANSI code page) that didn’t have that character, it would be replaced with a replacement character, the default on Windows being a question mark. A string of garbage characters is usually an encoding mismatch. For example, INTERROBANG is the Unicode character U+203D (0x203D). You could safely put that in HTML as an HTML escape sequence ‽ but you wouldn’t want that in an INPUT field(!), so you might put out that character encoded as UTF-8, which is 0xE2 0x80 0xBD (three bytes). But if you forgot to set the charset encoding for the web page to ‘utf-8’, it would interpret those bytes as characters in some other code page (and you would get three garbage characters – not to be confused with one box or one question mark:)). I18n is tricky, partly because you can’t always trust what you are seeing, because the thing showing the data to you might have mangled, misinterpreted, or otherwise changed it. And once, I didn’t set the charset to utf-8 on a web page, and HTML-encoded data got into the database. It actually looked like it worked, but the symptom was that you could only enter a few characters (It was a fixed-length field. I was testing entering Chinese characters. As HTML-encoded characters, each one took eight bytes instead of taking only three in utf-8. This was the one time I didn’t look at the database in hex). Since I’m rambling, it seemed fitting to leave the preceeding as one sprawling paragraph. Has this thread gone into the toilet, or what[INTERROBANG]
Edit: aw, this could have gone in the Random Facts thread (or maybe not)
Whew!!!
That’s why uni57 gets the big bucks and the Hooters girls.
what happen to toilet talk.??
They had a big toilet conference in Thailand 2 years ago. These countries believe if people have a nice place to sh*t they will want to visit.
The word “toilet” has become standardized to be the universal symbol. They beleive they will be less third world with modern j-jons
…so he builds a giant toilet idol for all to worship?
Is that pic of the real thing or a model (It’s only a model…). Here is a video of the construction.
They have guards posted in case this guy shows up:
World Toilet Summit gets down to business in New Delhi
By GAVIN RABINOWITZ
Associated Press Writer
1 November 2007
© 2007. The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
NEW DELHI (AP) - Though it includes such schemes as a solar-powered commode that runs without water, the 2007 World Toilet Summit is no bathroom novelty show.
Participants at New Delhi’s four-day gathering of experts, toilet aficionados, and even royalty from 44 countries are grappling with health and sanitation issues that endanger almost one-third of the world who don’t have toilets.
The United Nations estimates there are some 2.6 billion people without access to basic sanitation, over half living in India and China, a stark reminder of the challenges facing these developing nations despite their recent rampant economic growth .
“In India there are 700 million people who do not have access to safe and hygienic toilets. The waterborne diseases this causes kill 500,000 children every year, mostly from diarrhea,” said Bindeshwar Pathak, the head of the Sulabh Sanitation and Social Reform Movement.
The theme of the seventh annual toilet summit – co-hosted by Pathak’s group, the Indian government and the Singapore-based World Toilet Organization – is reaching the U.N.'s goal of halving the number of people living without water and sanitation by 2015.
With India hosting the event, it also focused on a unique local problem.
Euphemistically known as “night soil workers,” an estimated 500,000 people – most of them “untouchables” from the lowest rungs of India’s complex caste system – still work cleaning out human excrement from dry latrines.
“I was married when I was 10-years-old, since then I have been doing this work,” said Usha Chaumar, 30, a woman from the western state of Rajasthan describing how she would descend into the latrine pits early in the morning and carry out the fresh waste in a bucket on her head.
Chaumar would clean 15-to-20 of these latrines daily, paid 10 rupees (US$ 0.25 ; euro 0.17) per toilet per month.
“The people would throw the money on the floor so they would not have to touch me,” said Chaumar who is now in a training program run by the Sulabh group to change her hereditary profession.
For generations, the caste-system’s strict social order dictated what work people did, who they married, where they lived and even who they shared a meal with. For “untouchables” like Chaumar it meant a life doing what her ancestors had done and the diseases that accompany it.
“Now I am not untouchable, I am also a person, a good person,” she said, talking about her business selling pickles and her new life attending summits with royalty and presidents
Dutch Crown Prince Willem-Alexander who chairs the U.N. secretary-general’s advisory board on water and sanitation, was the guest of honor at the summit, while former Indian President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam opened the event.
India’s Rural Development Minister Raghvansh Prasad Singh told the conference that India was investing US$3.45 billion (euro2.4 billion) in sanitation projects including rehabilitation and self employment schemes for people like Chaumar.
Part of the problem is building expensive sewage systems in remote rural areas with scarce water supplies.
“Sewage systems are essentially 19th century technology, we need modern solutions,” said Pathak.
That is where toilets like the one being promoted by the company African Sanitation come in. Pioneered for the slums of southern Africa, it requires no plumbing, no water and almost no maintenance.
Once a week a tray below is emptied of waste, now turned into an almost odorless compost by a solar heater and natural bacteria.
Talking to the toilet experts – including a group of deeply earnest 12-year-old Indian school children who spend their weekends working with their school’s “sanitation club” – can be a sometimes-surreal expedition through technical aspects of personal hygiene and cultural differences inherent at a global toilet summit.
As African Sanitation’s Lukas Oosthuizen discovered, their model needed a minor addition of a water tray to the design before it could be effectively deployed in India.
“We discovered that people here are washers, not wipers,” he said.
Loo luxury on display at toilet summit
4 November 2007
The Times of India
© 2007 The Times of India Group
NEW DELHI: While 2.6 billion people in the third world still answer the nature’s call in the greens under the sky, the more developed nations seem keen on selling them attractive and easy toilet technologies. The aim is to ensure dignity and hygiene to the people for whom a loo is a luxury. The expo going on as part of the World Toilet Summit 2007 at the India Habitat Centre has state-of-the-art public toilet units on display that grab the visitor’s attention with their jazzy colours and flashy interiors.
There are blue and orange toilets from England and Netherlands and red and white urinals from Switzerland. In fact, the local manufacturers have reached a step ahead by developing a germ-free and stink-free toilet that has already been put to use in the lanes of Ajmer.
“We have painted the interiors of our toilet units with nanoparticle anti-bacterial coating which resists germs. There is also a fan provided inside the unit which pushes the air into a pipe that opens on the top of the unit. The pressure inside the toilet becomes higher than the pressure in the nostrils and so the stink does not reach the nose. It costs Rs 60,000 per unit,” said a beaming Madhu Thakar, a food equipment manufacturer, who developed this design by experimenting with his “eighth class physics.”
Thakar has also developed urinals centred around a pole, which will have an oil vessel at the bottom to trap stink. Thakar claims that his company is having talks with a civic body in the city to install them at important places.
A Dutch urinal made of plastic also grabbed a lot of attention as it resembled the water tank seen perched on the terraces of Indian homes. “This urinal is handy because in Europe, people use such toilets on rent only when they have to stay in open. The USP of this urinal is that many of them can be stacked and fitted into each other making them easy to be transported,” said Johan van Zuijlen, the designer from Netherlands.
While technologies abound and experts say it is good to study international best practices, every country still requires a different technology for its toilet system. Bindeshwar Pathak, the founder of Sulabh International Social Service Organisation believes that the right technology has arrived in India but it is government’s will that is required in the country today. “The technology best-suited to India is making manure out of human excreta. The waste is not flushed but stored till it turns into manure. Today, only 232 out of over 5000 towns have a sewage system in the country. So only government can adopt the right technology at the right scale if it acts,” he said. He added that the summit will help to pump funds in the country, which will get things going in the sanitation sector.
Toilet UPDs
Raphael,
Thanks! There is a relationship between toilets and unicycles: They both have one thing spinning, and we sit on them both.
But UPDs are less common on toilets.
When we go to the next Toilet Summit, I’m giving a presentation on Toilet UPDs, with video: Don’t let this happen to you!
The AP story of the South Korean Toilet House was on page two of this morning’s paper:
Hygiene enthusiast’s new home shaped like a john
By BURT HERMAN -The Associated Press
AHN YOUNG-JOON / AP
Haewoojae, reputedly the world’s only toilet-shaped house, is near Seoul, South Korea, and commemorates this month’s inaugural meeting of the World Toilet Association.
SUWON, South Korea — Sim Jae-duck has made his political career as South Korea’s Mr. Toilet by beautifying public restrooms. Now he’s got a home befitting his title: a toilet-shaped domicile complete with the latest in lavatory luxury.
Sim is building the two-story house set to be finished Sunday to commemorate the inaugural meeting later this month of the World Toilet Association. The group, supported by the South Korean government, aims no less than to launch a “toilet revolution,” by getting people to open their bathroom doors for the sake of improving worldwide hygiene.
Representatives from 60 countries will gather in Seoul to spur the creation of national toilet associations of their own and spread the word about hygiene. Organizers argue the issue deserves greater attention and cite U.N. figures that some 2.5 billion people live without proper sanitation or water supplies.
“The toilet revolution should start with talking about toilet issues freely,” said Song Young-kwon, head of the organizing committee for the five-day conference that opens Nov. 21.
The Seoul conference will be accompanied by a toilet expo featuring exhibits to excite the public about the cause: including a “Hansel and Gretel” bathroom made from cookies and candy that gives presents to children when they flush, and a “toilet gallery cafe” where people can sit on colorful commodes while drinking tea.
Sim, a lawmaker in the National Assembly, hopes his house in his hometown of Suwon, some 30 miles south of Seoul, will help bring attention to the cause and is seeking a guest to pay $50,000 to stay one night, with the proceeds to benefit the association that hopes to work with developing nations to build more and better toilets.
“Toilets stand central to people’s lives,” Sim said as workers scurried to put the finishing touches on the home — including installing the final toilet inside.
The toilet theme is central to the house named Haewoojae, or a “place to solve one’s worries,” shaped like a 24-<133>1/2-foot-tall toilet bowl. Thinking of how to push forward his cause of having better hygiene and sanitation, Sim tore down his former home to build the $1.1 million building.
A showpiece bathroom at the center of the 4,520-square-foot house is on display through a floor-to-ceiling window made of glass that turns opaque at the touch of a button. When guests enter to do their business, a motion sensor activates classical music.
Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company
I wonder if they play the William Tell Overature.
.
Of course, the US still has the world’s largest see-through toilet seat:
Despite all the jokes, sanitation is a serious issue: http://www.worldtoilet.org/
World Toilet Day is Monday, November 19 this year. Spread the word.