In the world of transgender rights, the battle for the bathroom has reached fever pitch, especially in the USA. Now, I’m not here to referee in this brawl – because on one side of the debate you have the ‘TERFs”, and on the other, the trans rights activists sometimes labelled “handmaidens”. Both are terms about as socially acceptable as weeing all over the toilet seat, and on the extreme fringes of both you find calls for violence. It seems every modern campaign group needs its villains and its sycophantic followers.
Both sides have got themselves worked up about issues that I’m pretty sure most transgender people would prefer to be handled with a little less shouting and little more thought. I have my own opinions, but that’s not for me to share here. What I’m looking at is how design can make the situation better, by picking on one such contentious issue: public bathrooms.
We’ve all got to admit that the concept of women only spaces wasn’t dreamt up at a lovely cocktail party. They often serve as a refuge from the stormy reality of life that many women face. The abused, the desperate, the traumatised who’ve experienced the worst aspects of a male dominated society are, quite rightly, entitled to seek out a safe space away from men.
Meanwhile, imagine you’re a transgender woman and are about to transition. You’ve got to live life as a woman for at least a year or two before anything permanent happens. It’s an obvious safety precaution so decisions aren’t made in haste.
So out you go on your first night in full femme mode. Nature calls, and you head to the bathrooms. You aim for the ladies, because, well, that’s where you belong now. But for some women in there you might be as welcome as a fox in a chicken coop.
Head into the men’s toilets and many trans women are as vulnerable to the nasty side of men as the traumatised women who want their safe spaces. You don’t feel you belong there.
All you want to do is check your lipstick and adjust the heels.
And there’s a twist here. I’ve met some women who are burly and could beat the majority of men in arm wrestling. They may look pretty masculine too. They’re now sometimes finding themselves being shouted at for heading into the ladies’ bathroom!
About designing loo layouts. The Brits generally build them with two doors going in, and stalls that are pretty private or, as is increasingly common, the toilets are individual spaces with floor to ceiling walls.
They love a gap! You could pass a handbag through that! Nobody wants to make eye contact with someone taking a dump.
So how about work is done to make sure bathrooms accommodate everyone? Picture a row of stalls which are just little rooms with proper walls. Private, no tinkling sounds being shared. Just a nice, lockable door for each person with a sign saying “Thinking Room”.
We can have scents and nice music for everyone, and ladies can compliment the prospective ladies for their make-up skills. Remember – the more people there are around the more likely they are to hear a shout for help. Predators hide in shadows, after all.
Just a thought. Ultimately then, this isn’t a potty problem. It’s a design problem. And that means we can design our way out of this mess, and make sure everyone is happy. Or are we going to just keep arguing until we’re just too old to care what’s going on in the next door toilet cubicle?
Comments. Please. Just remember the one rule on my site. Be kind.
The Heroku platform is an absolutely fantastic way to have to not bother with devops within a small development company. We’ve been using it at interconnect for years now, and whilst it’s not entirely perfect, it takes away one set of headaches and does so at a reasonable cost.
All the services offer backups, and the VMs are built from scripts and are essentially read only. So if something catastrophic happened to one of our databases, we can roll back a day and be OK. Except… let me explain my fears around data.
Trust issues with providers
In our very earliest years we used a VPS provider that used Plesk. Everything was solid and stable until one day, we got a report that a site had been hacked. Then another. It turned out that a vulnerability had exposed our sites to being hacked. And they were. This resulted in a big old clean up operation and restoration from backups. Except the daily backups we’d been paying for turned out to be weekly. So the backups we had were three days old. Ever since then, I’ve preferred to have a way of pulling backups separately to a server under my own control, unless the provider is Kumina, because I know the people so well that I’m 100% certain they’re as paranoid as I am and they’ve never ever let me down. But in the era of hustle culture bros who move fast and break things, you need a safety net.
Creeping corruption
My next fear is corruption you don’t notice immediately. I can well imagine that if all the meta data for the posts on a site before a certain date got wiped out, most people wouldn’t notice for ages. Imagine you’ve got a site with 200,000 posts, and various elements of the first 100,00 were damaged – the long tail matters to these sites and suddenly it’s all gone. Well, thank heavens for backups!
Except, of course, most cloud providers don’t provider substantial generational backups. Instead, they keep a few days or a week or so. And that’s your lot. If you need to go back months you’d better hope a developer in the company left a dump on their laptop somewhere – except of course that very very few developers keep dumps of production systems on their laptops – it’s bad practice and only tends to happen in exceptional circumstances and should be deleted soon after use.
How we fix it today
In the end, I asked one of my Linux oriented colleagues, Gianluigi, to create a service that would connect to Heroku’s API and then download every database, and sync every S3 bucket. It worked, with some limitations. More recently, because he’d left but remains a good friend, he helped me with a crash course in Linux sysadmin basics and I was able to extend and improve some bits. The system is a service written in PHP that does all the work. I then asked another colleague internally, Jack, to extend things to cover the PostgreSQL databases we also now used and to create a dashboard so that I could monitor the backups easily without resorting to logging into the backups servers.
The dashboard also doesn’t run on the backups servers. I needed to keep the backups as safe as possible – they’d be a great honeypot for a hacker, so they’re onioned away, and the backups service isn’t reachable from outside. Instead, it messages the dashboard with information about the backups taken. The dashboard also provides details on application and framework versions, for security monitoring and making sure updates have been applied appropriately, and it also sends me a daily summary email showing me storage space available and what was backed up in the previous 24 hours.
Here are a few screenshots of the system, with some censoring, but I hope you catch how it works from what you see.
To commercialise, or not?
And now to one of the reasons why I’ve decided to write about this. In the past, I created the first version of Search Replace DB – a quick script and algorithm I knocked up to parse a database and search and replace items in it. A fast, dangerous tool that I released as free open source code. Other people took it and commercialised it into successful products. We didn’t. And with the code being integrated into wp-cli and most devs would use that in preference (myself included!), except in those tricky situations where command line access wasn’t possible – mostly on cheap hosts. I think we were right to release the code, but where we failed was in realising the commercial possibilities. And that’s left me a little torn.
So now I’m torn – it’s not easy to set up services in Linux, but once you do, these things just run and run. It’s also not going to be the easiest thing to work with, so I anticipate support costs being quite high. It’s proper server level work. And I certainly don’t feel inclined to build a SaaS that acts as a conduit for people’s backups. It’s just too risky to have a central pool of lots and lots of backups, and people find them lurking on S3 buckets all the time. So I want to put this out to the community. Is this something you’d find useful? Let us know in the comments below. If we did release it, the code would be open source, but access to the latest versions would be restricted.
The traveller on a budget faces the very real problem that airlines employ differential pricing depending on where you are. Here’s my example – the next post will explain whether I got the lower price or not!
The traveller on a budget faces the very real problem that airlines employ differential pricing depending on where you are.
Here’s the UK page for a one way flight, with the otherwise excellent LAN Airlines, from Lima to Tacna in Peru:
How much?!
And now, the price if you go the Peruvian version of the site:
Over £100 cheaper!
Same flight, same class, same airplane.
Now, I know your average Brit makes considerably more money than your average Peruvian, but here’s the thing – if a McDonalds in Lima had two price boards up and the European one had prices three times as high you can imagine how that would make the average customer feel. I have actually seen this, where an English menu and a Spanish menu had different prices (and why it’s worth learning the local lingo at least a bit) but over 3x is bonkers.
Now, let’s see if I can book through the Peruvian version of the site. If they block me I’ll just have to call a Peruvian travel agency. Simple!
It also makes me wonder – had I been flying Lima to Liverpool and back, rather than the other way around, how much less would KLM have been charging? It almost makes me think of Adobe.
Quick Follow Up:
If you click through, you get the following message on the Peruvian site:
In other words, don’t even think about it! The price is available only to Peruvian residents. The cheapest price otherwise is a good $80 higher. Still a lot cheaper than the Brit price, however.
I suppose I could try another airline, but I once had a flight on a plane that was condemned soon after following safety ‘incidents’ when I flew on a Peruvian budget carrier, so I’m not wild about shopping around too much just yet.
Europeans are considered to be the best educated, most sophisticated people on the planet. They also like diving into bogs, throwing tomatoes at one another, and chasing cheese.
I sometimes think that the British are an unusual breed when it comes to sport, but when you look around Europe you start to realise that quite possibly we don’t have the monopoly we thought we did.
If you’re thinking of a trip to Europe where you can get involved with some local sports, consider these.
Here’s a selection of videos showing some of the things Europeans do for fun:
Cheese Rolling (England)
Take cheese, a round one. Go to a steep hill. Find a group of like minded maniacs. And then chase the cheese down the hill only to be greeted by a group of similarly crazy catchers waiting to ‘rescue’ you at the bottom. That’s England’s annual cheese rolling contest. Many people will be hurt and this is proof that the insurance companies and inept Health & Safety consultants haven’t yet managed to stop people risking their own lives for no sound reason whatsoever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOyQBSMeIhM
Wife Carrying (Finland)
The Scandinavians are about the most equitable people you can imagine, yet it’s the men that have to do the carrying in this sport. Wife Carrying is a sport that involves running a 253.5m course, with your wife on your back. I personally find the Estonian wife-lift the easiest, but there are a number of styles.
If you’ve been to Finland, you’ll know that they’re not the most svelte of peoples. If you want to take part and have a typically skinny French wife you stand a good chance…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIB9UcA5iQU
La Tomatina (Spain)
La Tomatina – Public domain image from Wikipedia, by Aaron Corey
The Spanish grow an awful lot of tomatoes. This needs celebrating. What better way than to throw them at each other? Every year, in Buñol, Valencia, the Spanish enjoy nothing more than to throw tomatoes at La Tomatina And why not? Beats throwing donkeys off churches. My family happens to live in the Valencia region, and I fully intend to attend though it’s worth noting – I’ve been to a few Spanish festivals and I know that alcohol and chaos feature strongly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPQCH1b_LgE
Bog Snorkelling (Wales)
You might think of snorkelling as something to do at a Caribbean beach. Not the Welsh. They like nothing better than to get into fancy dress, head to a bog and get swimming in the annual Bog Snorkelling competition. There are prizes for speed, but many people enter the contest to raise money for charity and, consequently, the efforts that get the most attention are likely to raise the most money – hence the fancy dress.
As part one of my campaign to introduce the concept of actually thinking to UK media, pundits and government, I’m covering the nasty little idea of automatic speed limiters being introduced to cars – so that people can, basically, stop thinking about the speed they drive at. That’ll work…
This subject has been rolling along for some years now. Basically the technology now exists to be able to instruct a car what speed it should travel at.
Now, if you’re a control freak, this is like a gift from heaven. If you’re a control freak in power (yes, that includes you Jacqui Smith) then it’s even more wonderful, because it hands you a whole ton of power.
Like everything, of course, it’s not all bad. There are plenty of good reasons for speed limiting cars, trucks and even fire engines. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea.
How The Pro Speed Limiters Present Their Argument
Slow, yet also lethal - public domain image with thanks to Wikipedia
There are currently a lot of fears in society, especially Western society. We’re scared of global warming, the economy, terrorism, and dying in a fiery ball of fire when some chav in a misguidedly tuned Vauxhall Nova comes careering head-on towards you as a result of massive overconfidence and a lack of skill. Throw those arguments into the air and you have some pretty strong arguments as to why we should introduce speed limiters.
Here’s a quick list of their key points:
Safety – you’ll hear this a lot. And it’s true. Go slower and if all else is equal safety will go up.
Economy – by being forced to go slower, you’ll drive more economically and be able to save the world from Global Warming at the same time.
Reduced need for thirsty, fast cars – true to a degree because what’s the point in a big V8 if you hit speed-limited wall at 70mph?
Reduced load on drivers – no need to think about speed, or worry about speed cameras.
It’s optional, there’s no need to fit a speed limiter if you don’t want it.
If you do have it, there’s an override button for those rare occasions you may need to go faster than strictly legal.
If only a minority of cars have this limiter, the effect will be to slow down others without it.
Lot’s of people are killed or injured daily, and anyone arguing against speed controls must be in favour of those deaths.
The arguments are mostly presented by different types of organisation. You have the emotionally irritating Brake, and the more calm but government funded (don’t forget this fact, they may sound independent but they aren’t) Motoring Forum, the UK Commission for Integrated Transport, and various other safety campaigners.
I can’t find a quote from Jacqui Smith on this subject, but I’m sure she’ll be along soon.
And The Argument Against
Well there has to be some rational argument against this, but unfortunately we’ve only got Safe Speed getting all the media attention on the other side. Holy Fucking Shit. I mean, really. Have you seen them? You wouldn’t trust these people to decorate your house, so why would you trust them with setting the agenda on speed limits and motoring policy?
Instead, why not get a psychologist who’s studied driving onto your show? Or, at a stretch, someone from the Institute of Advanced Motorists? But no, instead you get to listen to a muppet from Brake arguing with a muppet from Safe Speed. I suppose there’s only so many pundits to go round and the radio and TV stations pick the easiest ones they can find.
Sheesh.
But here we go – this is other people’s arguments, don’t forget. Mine come later.
It’ll encourage zombie behaviour, which is almost certainly true – in the US where freeways were once limited to the mind-numbingly dull speed of 55mph, you get to see a lot of this.
It’s a symptom of control-freakery – yep, almost certainly.
Speed doesn’t kill, it’s inattentive driving, which kind of cycles back to the first point.
It’s the thin end of a wedge which will end with all cars having compulsory speed limiters.
It probably won’t affect KSI (Kills and Serious Injuries) rates in the positive manner the pro side would like to see.
Slowing down can cause more accidents.
Thankfully, spokefolk from the RAC, AA and the likes are occassionally wheeled out to discuss such issues and they tend to be a bit more rational and thought out. But they’ve become rather dysfunctional resellers of insurance and recovery services these days, rather than the clubs and associations that they originally started out as. Consequently they have to toe a fine line between keeping customers (many of whom are the unthinking fools I worry about) and not upsetting the government (filled with the misguidedly thinking fools I also worry about) into adding more restrictions to both their customers and their businesses. So they tend towards making statements rather than take the risk of getting involved on radio or TV.
Of course, avoiding radio or TV is a sensible move for many. I’ve listened to myself on Radio and I’m clearly a rambling buffoon who doesn’t know when to shut up and who talks over others. Heaven knows what would happen if I found myself on TV. Of course, it’s not totally bad to be a buffoon – look how well Boris Johnson’s done out of it.
The best argument against this, so far, comes from the easy to respect Derek Charters, from the Motor Industry Research Association, who believes limiting speed automatically could cause accidents.
“The last thing you need is one car to be overtaking and then pull back in, in front of the cars in front, because that braking event will then cause everybody to start to slow down, which will then compress the traffic, which then causes an incident.”
The Dave’s Attempt to Think on this Subject
Oh Jesus, do we need the government controlling us just a bit more?
Would government controlled GPS units eventually be used to track our cars’ every movement?
A world full of cars doing identical speeds is so horrifically soporific that I suspect we’d be having massive pile-ups in no time.
The unthinking are the worst people to get this technology – they’ll just turn into motoring zombies.
Going faster is fun. Sometimes it’s good to be able to have a bit of fun, you know, even if it does make the world ever so slightly less safe.
All speeds are dangerous – being crushed to death by a 2mph Audi Q7 isn’t much fun either – stop people from realising how dangerous cars are and boom! more dead people.
It’ll probably mean the end of the fantastic Top Gear show.
It’ll make moving to South America far more appealing.
The key arguments for or against this idea are really just noise. The question we should be asking is at what point should drivers give up responsibility for the movements of their cars? Lane sensing technology has matured enough that you could conceivably place your Honda at the beginning of the M6 and drive all the way to Scotland without touching the wheel, brakes or throttle again, coming to a stop when the traffic in front does so, and accelerating to a set speed when it’s possible to do so. I remain to be convinced that all this is a good idea, but at least it’s entirely within the control of the driver – he can choose what is and is not switched on, and where.
GPS technology is constantly improving, as are sensors. It’s only a matter of time before we can simply climb into our cars, shout “take me to work, autocar!” and climb into the back for a nap. Sounds like a wonderful idea to me and I wouldn’t care what speed the car travelled at so long as it woke me up on arrival and neatly parked itself while I go for a pee.
Partial implementation, on a wide scale, of speed limiters or even smart cruise control could be lethal. Each car would end up driving at ever so slightly different speeds. Overtaking moves could be measured in miles, and it wouldn’t matter if you didn’t have a speed limiter – you’d be stuck behind those with them fitted. And those who choose to have them fitted would be sitting in a smug pool of self-superiority, knowing they’re driving at the maximum safe speed. They’d be wrong, of course. 70mph is safe when it’s clear and dry. It’s safe even when it’s wet. But in a deluge it’s lethal. But having given up the act of thinking about speed they would just keep their foot mashed down on the carpet. Until they eventually plough into the back of the car in front that they couldn’t see.
And that’s why this topic has made it into the Campaign for Thinking. Full automation is a good thing, it means you can go and think about something else. But a world full of drivers who believe thinking about speed is only for the government… God preserve us!
Now, could the government get on with thinking about things they could help us with? Infrastructure, international security, the economy, tax… that kind of stuff? The big, hard problems that they have the power to do something about? 3,000 people a year die on the roads. 60,000 people a year die from murders in South Africa. And providing assistance to unstable or impoverished countries could save the lives of millions. Unfortunately it’s hard to get elected on the promise of saving the lives of AIDS stricken Tanzanians, but you could save or dramatically improve the lives of more than 3,000 of them with the millions spent on speed limiter studies. Yes, I know it’s a straw man argument, but a little sense of perspective on the point of all this would be useful.
I’m no fan of gruesome videos, but sometimes they’re necessary because otherwise we forget just what can go wrong and fail to plan for the worst. In the UK at least marshalls are some of the best – this is what happens when the marshalls aren’t well trained.
When I first saw this accident I felt sick. However, I didn’t see the subsequent marshalling and safety disaster. Once I saw the full video, and learned that the driver, Tetsuya Ota had survived and recovered then I decided it would make a good instructive video.
It took another driver to actually attend to Ota, which is one shock. The other was that people were standing around and completely failing to deal with the injured Ferrari driver.
Marshalls are hugely appreciated by the competitors – especially in Britain where we know that marshalls are well trained, professional, and devoted to their sport. They really are the stars that make our sport possible.
If you have a nervous disposition I recommend you don’t view the video:
A lot of travellers worry about being robbed, kidnapped, raped, or jailed for trumped up drugs charges.
But they get on a knackered bus, driven by a coca leaf chewing driver for 12hrs at a stretch, along the most dangerous roads in the world, without a second thought. I´m pretty certain more travellers die in road accidents than any other way out here. Our driver for Chiway (Chivay) from Arequipa was, I´m sure, Fangio´s long lost and suspiciously young twin brother. But we got home quicker than anyone else so there´s always an upside.
In a week I´ll be saying goodbye to the rest of the group and striking out alone. Can´t say I´m looking forward to that moment, but it´ll also be nice to set my own pace and explore some more awkward places. Or just lounge for a week or two at a beach resort in Chile I´ve heard of. We’ll see….
Tomorrow is another day of Cusco – quite the most beautiful town I´ve seen. Full of a mix of colonial and Inca architecture, though the colonials pretty much finished off the Incan work. The day after is Macchu Pichu, or Machu Picchu – I can never remember the right spelling. It´s famously amazing, and we hoped to trek to it but the bad weather we´ve experienced here has, at times, turned the streets into rivers. Not good up a mountain so we´ll wimp out and take the train.
The Incan stonework is something to admire – close fitting stones, without cement, lock together and have survived many earthquakes. The foundations of many colonial buildings are Incan and you can still see the fine work. You literally can´t slide a cigarette paper between the stones. How they did it so well is a bit of a mystery. It´s a shame that the Conquistadors destroyed the indiginous culture so thoroughly. Had they not been quite so obsessed by shiny things Europe´s effect on South America would still be dramatic – we brought with us diseases as well as war, and this combination elicited one of the great holocausts in history, killing perhaps up to 90% of the native people according to some sources. But whichever way you look at it, we weren´t a positive factor here.
