The Coriolis Effect

Life most young folk I knew in the 90s, I was pretty excited when The Simpsons made a special episode about my small, culturally insignificant nation. I still chuckle a bit about "knifey-spoony" to this day. However, my enthusiasm for that episode was tempered by my confusion about the whole "which way the water in the toilet spins when you flush it" argument that leads to the eventual Simpson family trip to Australia. For the uninitiated, the toilet flushing mechanism is quite different in Australia to the normal systems in place in North America. When flushed, water tends to rush into Australian toilet bowls from all directions in a kind of whitewater cascade without any discernible pattern or rotation. Having grown up accustomed to this type of flushing system, I didn't understand the argument Bart and Lisa have in the iconic Simpsons episode about which way the water spins in the southern hemisphere. So, you can imagine the mixture of surprise, curiosity, and epiphany (with respect to the Simpsons episode - let's not get too carried away, although it had been bugging me for years) I experienced upon flushing my first North American toilet and seeing the water in the basin spin around as it drained out.

It turns out that this effect is not, as claimed in The Simpsons, due to the Coriolis effect, because the body of water in the bowl is too small to be appreciably influenced by the Earth's rotation. But I have hit upon a new way in which the Coriolis effect may be influencing my everyday life.

I have never in my life had as much belly button lint as I do here in Canada. It's frankly disturbing just how much lint my belly button is collecting. If this lint is coming from my clothes, it's a wonder I have any shirts left. People have posited a number of explanations for this phenomenon: I'm wearing woolen thermals, I'm using a tumble dryer more frequently, etc. None of these can account for the increase in lint compared to the quantities generated during my time in New Zealand, where I wore the same clothes, did pretty-much the same stuff, and used similar laundering techniques.

Indeed, it appears that the independent variables have been held about as constant between my time in New Zealand in Canada as they could reasonably be expected to be. The only thing that has changed is that I'm now north of the equator, rather than south. It seems that in some kind of cosmic coincidence, the reversed direction of the Coriolis effect in the northern hemisphere has aligned with the layout of my body hair to achieve a perfect storm of belly button lint.