Bathroom faucets (or toilet faucets, as I should probably call them down here) have come a long way over the last several decades. To save me spending a couple hours drawing cartoons to illustrate, simply imagine on the far left, a basin with two spouts each surmounted by a valve with four prongs for ease of twisting. To those still giddy over the fact that you have running water INSIDE the house, this probably seems like a real treat. All you need to do is get a bucket and fill it with a blend of the two flows. However, dare you leave the bucket out of the process, you are destined to scald or freeze your hands as you lather and rinse them off. If you're quick, you can alternate back and forth at a rate faster than your nervous system can register temperature and deceive yourself that this set-up is the product of a rational mind.
Next along the line of descent is a slightly more advanced form with ergonomic knobs on the valves instead of those awkward four-pronged devils that seem to grind a hole in your palm when the previous user over-torqued in an effort to quell the drip.
At the third step of progress, a stroke of absolute brilliance - there are still two valves but now only one spout. A desired temperature can now be achieved with minimal abuse to the hands. The scalding and freezing problem is still there in that temperature, for some reason, doesn't instantly adjust and the delay between your knob-turning efforts and the temperature of the water causes an annoying alternation between too hot and too cold. All this can be avoided through a combination of careful calibration of the valve-position to flow-through rates and a bit of matrix algebra but this is rarely done partially due to a lack of familiarity with 2x2 matrix inversion (even though it really is quite easy). I leave both the delay differential equation model and the derivation of the matrix equation as an exercise for the zealous mathematical reader.
The next three steps are more about ergonomics and aesthetics than full blown fitness optimization so I'll leave them, as well, to the reader to imagine as a creativity exercise.
The final and truly magical step brings us to the faucet equivalent of homo sapiens. It is sometimes cited by Intelligent Design advocates as an Irreducibly Complex specimen that could not possibly have arisen by simple random mutation through a series functional intermediate forms. Hot and cold are now so hidden from the user that it is not even clear from the bathtroom-side of things that the water is delivered through two separate pipes. The valve is now controlled by a flip-level that slides side to side, driving the temperature up and down almost as if it were directly connected, telepathically, to your mind.
If you were to check the date on this post and then take a peak a few posts back to my travel itinerary, you might think that this natural history lesson was inspired by my experiences in Thailand. Don't be fooled. Thailand has it's quirks, no doubt, but primitive faucet technology is not one of them. The answer to this riddle lies in a second primitivity of the country that inspired this post. While in New Zealand, I was unfortunately unable to get my USB SIM card to connect to the relatively non-existent high-speed cell phone network often enough to find the time to upload this post.
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