ROGER'S DIARY OF THE END TIMES: Nawbany is losing the Toilet Race to the Japanese.

As the hippie rock band once observed, we have all been here before.

Revisiting "Pissoirs for the People" -- or, will there be public restrooms in the new luxury Reisz complex, and if so, how much will Team Gahan charge us to use them?

New Albany's new $15 million city hall, which is taking far longer to complete than expected, is a genuine sign of the end times before we even begin to consider Jeff Gahan's gold-plated fixtures.

One thing's for sure: Deaf might be okay with losing the toilet race to some confusing Asian country of which he's blissfully unaware, BUT THAT HORRID POSEUR MIKE MOORE IS ANOTHER STORY ENTIRELY.

We can only hope the shipment of superior Japanese toilet technology eludes the coronavirus cordon.

Why America Is Losing The Toilet Race

I just got back from my first trip to Japan, and I'm now in love with the country. The ramen, yakitori and sushi. The gorgeous volcanoes. The fascinating people and culture. But of all the things I fell in love with, there's one that I can't stop thinking about: the toilets.

Japanese toilets are marvels of technological innovation. They have integrated bidets, which squirt water to clean your private parts. They have dryers and heated seats. They use water efficiently, clean themselves and deodorize the air, so bathrooms actually smell good. They have white noise machines, so you can fill your stall with the sound of rain for relaxation and privacy. Some even have built-in night lights and music players. It's all customizable and controlled by electronic buttons on a panel next to your seat.

Oliver Sacks: "Information is different from knowledge."

Oliver Sacks died in 2015, and it's not clear when this essay first was published, but it's excellent. That's all I have to say. Technology obviously isn't going away. However, individuals can resist its ubiquity. I recently wrote about this.

Just an off-the-cuff rumination about taking our sweet time to get it right.

My resolution for the year 2019 is that whenever prompted to breathlessly participate in our short, social media-driven collective attention span, I'll do my very best to opt out, remain calm and seek space sufficient for deliberation.

Want me to hurry up? Sorry, this only encourages me to stop and think harder about it. Pour yourself another drink, because my musings might take a while.

Want me to scroll through the image carousel and indulge in the national flashcard kaleidoscopic consciousness? Nah. I'd rather slow down and mull the topic in depth -- and look at the pictures later, once I'm familiar with the context.

Now, to Sacks.

The Machine Stops, by Oliver Sacks (The New Yorker)

The neurologist on steam engines, smartphones, and fearing the future.

 ... I have not adjusted as well as my aunt did to some aspects of the new—perhaps because the rate of social change associated with technological advances has been so rapid and so profound. I cannot get used to seeing myriads of people in the street peering into little boxes or holding them in front of their faces, walking blithely in the path of moving traffic, totally out of touch with their surroundings. I am most alarmed by such distraction and inattention when I see young parents staring at their cell phones and ignoring their own babies as they walk or wheel them along. Such children, unable to attract their parents’ attention, must feel neglected, and they will surely show the effects of this in the years to come.

In his novel “Exit Ghost,” from 2007, Philip Roth speaks of how radically changed New York City appears to a reclusive writer who has been away from it for a decade. He is forced to overhear cell-phone conversations all around him, and he wonders, “What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say—so much so pressing that it couldn’t wait to be said? . . . I did not see how anyone could believe he was continuing to live a human existence by walking about talking into a phone for half his waking life.”

These gadgets, already ominous in 2007, have now immersed us in a virtual reality far denser, more absorbing, and even more dehumanizing. I am confronted every day with the complete disappearance of the old civilities. Social life, street life, and attention to people and things around one have largely disappeared, at least in big cities, where a majority of the population is now glued almost without pause to phones or other devices—jabbering, texting, playing games, turning more and more to virtual reality of every sort.

Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases. There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in a world devoted to non-stop use of social media. Every minute, every second, has to be spent with one’s device clutched in one’s hand. Those trapped in this virtual world are never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate in their own way, silently. They have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the face of one’s beloved.

A few years ago, I was invited to join a panel discussion about information and communication in the twenty-first century. One of the panelists, an Internet pioneer, said proudly that his young daughter surfed the Web twelve hours a day and had access to a breadth and range of information that no one from a previous generation could have imagined. I asked whether she had read any of Jane Austen’s novels, or any classic novel. When he said that she hadn’t, I wondered aloud whether she would then have a solid understanding of human nature or of society, and suggested that while she might be stocked with wide-ranging information, that was different from knowledge. Half the audience cheered; the other half booed ...

How did Estonia become a leader in technology? "By ditching legacy technology and betting on education."

It's been a year. Can we go back?

It's one of the few instances where being so very far behind turns out to be an advantage.

The Economist explains: How did Estonia become a leader in technology?

By ditching legacy technology and betting on education

WHEN Estonia regained its independence in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, less than half its population had a telephone line and its only independent link to the outside world was a Finnish mobile phone concealed in the foreign minister's garden. Two decades later, it is a world leader in technology. Estonian geeks developed the code behind Skype and Kazaa (an early file-sharing network). In 2007 it became the first country to allow online voting in a general election. It has among the world’s zippiest broadband speeds and holds the record for start-ups per person. Its 1.3m citizens pay for parking spaces with their mobile phones and have their health records stored in the digital cloud. Filing an annual tax return online, as 95% of Estonians do, takes about five minutes. How did the smallest Baltic state develop such a strong tech culture?

Driver jailed for three years for ramming cyclist, though nowhere near here -- but that's okay, because bikes will win in the end ... nowhere near here.

Wait -- is this a glimmer amid the riverbank anchor's mud?

Here's a refreshing headline, one seen about as often in metro Louisville as unicorns in plaid.

Driver jailed for three years for ramming cyclist in north London, by Kevin Rawlinson (The Guardian)

Justine Henshaw-Bryan, 25, used ‘car as a weapon’ after Damien Doughty confronted her about using phone while driving

A motorist who used her car to chase a cyclist and ram him into a tree after an argument over her use of a mobile phone at the wheel has been jailed for three years.

Damien Doughty suffered serious injuries after the incident in north London in February last year. Justine Henshaw-Bryan, who is now pregnant and due to give birth in November, claimed her boyfriend had grabbed the wheel.

But the judge told her she had used the car “as a weapon” to injure the cyclist and could have killed him.

“Those who are unable to control their temper while driving and feel that cyclists are fair game must be dealt with severely,” Judge Gregory Perrins told her as he passed sentence on Wednesday.

He said she must have been aware of the risk her driving presented to him. “This was a calculated attempt to run him over and use your car as a weapon. It would have been obvious that to do so would have carried significant risk of injury.”

Similar instances of driver abuse in our vicinity rarely make it as far as a judge given that the non-enforcement culture habitually absolves drivers of responsibility.

But hey, don't get mad.

Get even.

The case for bicycles' inevitable triumph over cars, by Matt McFarland (CNN)

Bikes, long an underdog on streets, will rule the roads eventually.

That's the conclusion of Horace Dediu, a prominent analyst of disruptive technologies, who has spent the past three and a half years researching the future of transportation.

Transportation is arguably the hottest frontier in the tech world. Innovators in Silicon Valley and beyond are spending billions to build flying cars and self-driving trucks. Tesla CEO Elon Musk talks of digging costly 30-level tunnel networks for cars. Google cofounder Sergey Brin reportedly has a giant airship.
But as Dediu sees it, a familiar, unglamorous technology will own the future: the bicycle. And the big loser will be cars.

"Bikes have a tremendous disruptive advantage over cars. Bikes will eat cars," Dediu told CNNTech, referencing investor Marc Andreessen's seminal 2011 argument that software-driven businesses are dominating the world.