Re: Instrumented toilet seats

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Jul 18 2000 - 09:10:17 MDT


John Clark wrote:
>
> What about the $1500 toilet seat, did it have accelerometers mounted on it to measure
> resonances and vibration modes too?

My father, who is more antigovernment than I am, hates the example of
the $1500 toilet seat. Mention it to him, and he'll start explaining
all the things that toilet seats on military aircraft have to do. (For
some reason, I don't recall what any of them are.)

Personally, I think that the military does often make a mess of such
things: that the military bureaucracy will prefer a shoddy military
component to a reliable civilian one, and that the bidding system
overspecifies far beyond the range of reason or sanity. Nonetheless,
there is nothing inherently ridiculous about a $1500 toilet seat.

-- 
        sentience@pobox.com    Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
              http://singinst.org/beyond.html


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:30:01 MST