A couple years ago, I thought the motion-sensor towel dispensers were awesome. I'm one of those people that doesn't like to touch too many things in a public bathroom, although I strongly dislike automatic faucets (because they don't work well and the water's always cold), and I don't go so far as to turn off manual faucets or open doors with a layer of paper towel or my elbow as protection.
Even better? The new electric hand dryers.
Back in January, I visited Eric in Brigantine and on a session of errand-running, we stopped in the Target in Hamilton Township to use the restroom. Upon exiting, I asked him if he had used the hand dryer. "You mean the one powered by Boeing?" he countered. I thought that was immensely funny. Now that that's my Target, at least through September, I think of him every time I go in that bathroom (your call on whether that's a good association or not).
It was the XLerator hand dryer, and it was crazy. It blew so hard that it moved the skin on the back of your hands all over the place -- disconcerting to see how much give my skin has at this young age -- and dried them in seconds.
Even cooler? The Dyson Airblade, which I got to try in the Brussels airport. It was a weird sensation -- not really having air blown on your hands, but not quite like having water sucked off your hands, either. Also dried your hands in seconds.
In my mind, the bare minimum for all public restrooms is now the motion-sensored towel dispenser. Extra points go to those using the new hand dryers. This is all for coolness and convenience points, of course. However, the Green Lantern even says they're more eco-friendly.
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5 comments:
I LOLed at Eric's Boeing comment. What an Eric thing to say! It makes me miss you guys :/
I LOLed at it, too! It was classic Eric. Miss you too :(
Hey you! Read this. You seemed to have known it all when it came to vaccines. Choke on this!
http://www.whas11.com/news/local/stories/071008whascwTopGardasil.4245f1c5.html
1. Hello again. Glad to see that even though you seem to despise me, you continue to read my blog.
2. You get your national health news and information from WHAS? No offense to WHAS; they're great and indispensable for local news and weather, but seriously? You don't read major news publications like the New York Times (discussed this May 15), Time magazine (June 19), or any newspaper that uses Associated Press content (January 3)? You could even go right to the source and read the CDC's reports themselves (VAERS is online, and so is MMWR, which reported about HPV side effects on May 2). Believe me, this is NOT breaking news.
3. You know what the #1 reported side effect of the HPV vaccine (and all vaccines) is? Pain at the injection site. Um, duh. #2? Fainting (and that occurred at a whopping rate of 1 time per 2 MILLION doses of vaccine administered). The #1 cause of serious injury following vaccination with HPV? Hitting your head after fainting (in one case, a girl was hospitalized in the ICU for skull fractures because she fell so hard). So now patients are asked to wait around for 15 minutes after getting the shot. I'm not sure what about all of that I'm supposed to "choke on."
4. Since you don't appear to read major news publications, you also probably missed the report that 1 in 4 adolescents has a sexually transmitted infection, and the most common one is HPV. As more adolescents get vaccinated against it, that statistic is likely to change in the future -- for the better.
5. This may be beyond you, but VAERS is a reporting system, consisting of passive surveillance. It is intended and designed to collect any and all data that may indicate a reason to conduct further research. So if one person receives a vaccine and has a side effect (let's say nausea), that does NOT mean that the nausea was caused by the vaccine. Maybe the patient had some bad egg salad at lunch. YOU DON'T KNOW. But if more people report nausea following vaccine administration, then that is a signal to conduct further research -- baseline would be a case-control study, and gold-standard would be a randomized, controlled trial. Until you perform a randomized, controlled trial, YOU CANNOT PROVE CAUSALITY.
Maybe your concern is the more serious-sounding reported adverse events? Sure, they're serious, and that's a shame and very unfortunate. But if someone already had leukemia brewing in their system and happened to get vaccinated the day before their leukemia became apparent, there's little way of knowing, based on VAERS, which came first. So you can't be so quick to blame the vaccine. If you started a new medicine and got into a car crash, there is very little way to determine if the car crash was caused by the new medicine. All the government has done is given you a way to report the fact that the crash occurred after the medicine was taken. And then, if it happens to more people, we can investigate further.
Did you also miss the story about rotavirus working wonders? That was a good one, too (New York Times, July 8). Think of all those babies in this country who don't have to get the worst diarrhea in their lives, and all the babies in other countries with poor sanitation who won't die as a result of rotavirus diarrhea. Sounds like a good thing to me.
The bottom line is, you're definitely not going to change my mind, because I have researched this extensively and know that what I know is based on facts. It's quite likely that I'm not going to change your mind, because you insist on attacking me, threatening me, and arguing emotionally, rather than intelligently. If you continue to visit, I'll continue to discuss, but please rest assured that you are causing me no upset or distress. I just wish I had a more formidable opponent to argue with. It would make things more interesting.
I first encountered these dryers when Jenny and I were driving down to Abingdon a year or so ago - she and I were like little kids. And you think YOU were disconcerted by what it does to the skin on the back of your hands?
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