Happy New Years everyone! It's back to Atlanta and back to blogging. I hope you guys had a great holiday season.
It's hard for me to take a few days off of work and study. I keep seeing things that inadvertendly remind me of work.
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My boyfriend and I went to Disneyland over the break, and I couldn't help but notice that not only was the women's restroom poorly designed, but really should have had low-flush toilets. It is southern California, after all, and water is one of our most precious resources.
But between the poop jokes at my research (I think an inevitable part of my life now, thanks to my research), I managed to take a few days off and relax, and am now ready to attack the new year like a caffeinated cheetah! (Ok, maybe not yet. Give me a few days to recover from New Year's Eve.)
It's been a lot of fun blogging this past year, and I've been really flattered at the positive response. I'm trying to get back into the swing of things back here in Atlanta, so I've decided to be a bit lazy and jump on the "looking back on 2012 list" bandwagon. Here's a look at my top 5:
1. By FAR, my post, "How the Romans wiped: the history of toilet paper part 1," has been the most popular of all my posts. (Check out part two here!) I guess we're all a bit curious about these things. I also can't help but cringe when I think of the Roman sponge sticks.
2. My post on Code Red! an app for that time of the month seemed to strike a cord with a lot of my readers, especially my female ones. Public restrooms are perhaps one of the most evident ways in which inequality is literally physically constructed in the world.
3. I was a bit surprised at the popularity of my post on airplane bathrooms that I wrote back in July. I guess there is something rather mysterious about the airplane toilet. After a 27-hour plane ride, I had fun scouring the internet to figure out how it all works.
4. From the annals of weird academic studies, this post, "The urinal next to yours: an actual academic study," discusses a psychology experiment in which the scientists used a periscope hidden in a stack of books to examine how long it took someone to start urinating when someone was using the urinal next to theirs. Incidentally, I came upon this study as an example of "studies that won't pass the ethics board anymore."
5. This post, "Sit or squat?", engages in the debate over which is healthier. I've loved how people have responded--I've even had friends tell me that they're half-way tempted to install a squat toilet in their own home. (I know I want one.)
So thanks for reading, commenting, submitting, or chatting!
Join me sometime within the next week when I discuss polio in Pakistan, and how the polio vaccine works when you're not in the US.
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