Should You Fold or Wad Toilet Paper? A Physicist Settles the Debate for Good - Dollar Shave Club Original Content [Printable]
Should You Fold or Wad Toilet Paper? A Physicist Settles the Debate for Good - Dollar Shave Club Original Content
Occasionally, doing research for articles leads me to question some of my core beliefs. For example, I thought it was normal to use the same towel for days on end, and just the other day I learned my showering habits were all wrong. What else am I doing wrong? Turns out, wiping my own butt.
Dr. Sam Novario, a theoretical and computational nuclear physicist who once blew up his stove for an experiment, says the truth is actually much more complicated than what might appear on the surface. “There are whole mathematical sub-fields that deal with folding and functional origami.”
Wipe integrity, he explains, deals with the “sheer strength of the TP,” and the probability that the wipe stays intact, “which increases with a wipe’s effective thickness.” So what began as a simple matter of getting more poop per square now becomes a problem of probability and integrity thresholds.
There’s yet another variable we must assume constant in this equation: wiping style and pressure. Someone who wads and scrubs the living hell out of their butt is naturally going to think wadding is better. But to find a scientific baseline, Novario says, we must assume “a standard style and constant pressure between the fold and the wad.”
Finally, we must assume we’re wadding or folding the same brand of toilet paper, be it an expensive, ultra-soft brand or a cell-thin, entirely translucent brand. Wadding might appear to offer more efficiency in wiping due to the three-dimensionality of the shape, Novario explains, but at the same time, “expensive toilet paper has bumps and ridges” that can get you the same efficiency without reducing the wipe area.
https://www.dollarshaveclub.com/content/story/should-you-fold-or-wad-toilet-paper-a-physicist-settles-the-debate-for-good