The crazy auto-cleaning toilet seats at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport are finally catching up to American waistlines.

Sometime within the last few months, the toilets in American Airlines’ Terminal 3 got an upgrade, and the seats are now a few inches longer.

It no longer feels like you’re borrowing a toddler’s Fisher-Price potty chair. There is still, however, the weird feeling that you are squatting on a grocery bag.

According to this Knight News Service article, Chicago first installed the automatic plastic seat cover system in July, 1993, as a way to promote hygiene without clogging toilets with paper seat covers. (Side note: This is the first time I’ve ever seen a Google newspaper scan show up in search results like this. Cool.) Some 600 toilets cost the city $350,000 to install, or about $580 each.

The first system was by Swiss-founded Hygolet, which may explain the small size. But the one in my first picture is a Sani-Seat, made by New Jersey-based North American Hygiene. I didn’t get a chance to check out who makes the new ones — knowing Chicago, probably a distant cousin of Mayor Daley — but they seem to be better all-around.

Here’s a random guy’s YouTube video showing the newest toilet seats at work. There’s plenty of videos on YouTube of the old ones.

To get a list of photos like these:

• Head over to Twitter’s search engine, and then click on “Advanced search.”
• In the “Words > All of these words” section, type in “twitpic” or “yfrog” — this will search for tweets that include a link to Twitpic or YFrog, two popular Twitter photo services.
• In the “Places > Near this place” section, type in a city name. We’ll do Tokyo.

You’ll get a list of 15 tweets containing Twitpic URLs whose senders have location within 15 miles of Tokyo. (The search query box will look like “twitpic near:tokyo within:15mi” — you can just type that string in next time.)

The limitation today is that Twitter’s location feature is based on the location that the user has filled in manually on their profile settings page. So if your profile has your location listed as “New York,” but you’re on vacation in Paris, it’s still going to think your photos are from New York. This despite many Twitter users having built-in GPS services to “tag” the image with their real-time location — on an iPhone, for example. (Obviously a place for future improvement, and in practice, not a deal-breaker.)

In the meantime, here’s that gallery of Tokyo Twitpics. Lots of food pictures — especially popular on Twitter — and landscape shots make this a neat tool to check out places you’re thinking of going. Click on a photo to see it full-size or to scroll through the gallery.

But the most interesting question — to me, at least — is at the end:

Why not send steady streams of telemetry from airliners to the ground all the time — a la the space shuttle? This effectively places the “black boxes,” safe and sound — on the ground. Imagine how invaluable that much data would be right now — given the distinct possibility this could remain an unsolved mystery.

That’s an excellent question. Given how advanced communication technology is these days, it seems like a smart idea for airliners to constantly feed home base as much information as possible: Its location and position, how flight and peripheral systems are working, how many people are using the bathroom, what movies are popular, etc. Especially the safety stuff.

I can think of four reasons why airlines aren’t doing this already: Because it’s almost always data they’ll throw out immediately after the plane lands safely, because radio spectrum may be scarce and unreliable, because they aren’t required to do it by law, and because it’s the last information they’d want slipping into the wrong hands.

But so what? These seem like problems that can be worked out. Now, as O’Brien points out, we’re potentially in a worse situation: Not knowing if the A330 is safe to fly in certain conditions. So where are those data streams?

Photo of Air France F-GZCP — the plane that vanished — by Gabriel Widyna on Airliners.net