Hello and welcome to Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column, the 32nd of its kind it’s a games and tech podcast you can read or column you can listen to – that is how versatile it is. Theme tune!
(AUDIO VERSION ONLY BUT PLEASE HAVE A WEE LISTEN!)
Apologies to those of a sensitive disposition, but I’m starting with a tech story about a certain earthy part of the anatomy this week. The bum. The bottom. The derriere. The arse. The money maker. The booty. The patootie. The caboose. The keester. The crack. The starfish. OK I should stop now. No. Ok. Brown town. The prison purse. The old dirt road. The rusty bullet hole. The ring. The growler. The Hersheys chocolate highway.
Ok that really is enough. We all have better things to do.
This genuinely is the weirdest machine invention I have ever heard of, and I was alive for the Nintendo Power Glove.
It comes from the Georgia Tech Research Institute and the props go to a mechanical engineering student called David Ancalle and an aerospace engineer called Maia Gatln. Remember their names because in years from now their names will produce the same reverence as Einstein or Madame Marie Curie herself.
It is a mechanical device loaded with pumps, nozzles, and tubes meant to recreate the physics — and sounds — of human bodily function. Pees poos and farts in other words.
Why is it doing this? Other than just for a total fucking laugh? Well, the ultimate aim is to create an AI that can tell just from audio whether your fart, pee and/or poo is carrying a disease like cholera, which kills 500,000 a year and is the third highest cause of child mortality in the world.
So, the plan is that they would have machines installed in public toilets and if someone emits a pee, poo, or fart that they recognize as being chock full of the cholera, or other such horrible diseases, it will flag this up so they can shut that shit down. Literally. And prevent outbreaks.
Now. Here is the kicker. They have named this machine: the Synthetic Human Acoustic Reproduction Testing machine.
Can you work out what those letters spell out.
Yes.
S.H.A.R.T.
I swear I am not making this up. I have checked and rechecked the source of this information online to check it isn’t an enormous piss take and it appears totally genuine.
Farts say more about your health than you think — now, scientists are listening (inverse.com)
Sorry. Poor choice of words there because literally this machine IS an enormous piss take. And poo take. And fart take. Anyway, if it saves lives and has a witty name? that makes it OK by me. And this is also by some margin the most I have ever used the words piss, poo and fart together in anything I have written or spoken aloud in 31 years making a living in the media. So that’s not something to be sniffed at. Unlike this machine.
(PIC “What a bloody brilliant invention!” A toilet said, yesterday.)
And on that medically important but wonderfully puerile bombshell, that is it for your free teaser version of the column podcast this week. Please consider supporting my work by graduating to the PAID PAL version, then the thing you get is 4 to 5 times the length of this and you get access to the archive of 31 other column podcasts AND the legendary Domments Comments Section. If you can’t do that then I will catch you next week in the free seats. Until then? Keep it little, keep it old, keep it purple.
Dominik's Little Old Purple Column #32 FREE TEASER