The Washlet - the apocalypse is upon us.

I've just seen a beautiful web site for a beautiful product and become ill as a result. Feast your eyes on the Washlet, a toilet seat which wipes your ass for you. Washlet is clearly designed by the world's top user experience engineers. You can just tell that it is a high performance piece of gear, like a BMW or an Ipod. And washlets can be found in 60% of homes in Japan.

The Washlet web site is remarkably clean and pleasing. Roll over the talking heads (innovative navigation!) and listen to the pleasing chimes. The only trouble is ...

We are overheating our Earth. Our food supply is poorly distributed. Our disaster response capability is medieval. These exciting and interesting engineering problems, but our brightest engineers are designing Washlets. This is not at all good. May I remind you about the demise of Easter Island. Read it.