It’s one of my inappropriate set pieces. When I run into particularly uppity engineers who want to use 10 sensors and 5 motors to open a door, I give them the butthole monologue to point out that physical complexity != functionality.

sigh

In industry there is something called “multi-phase flow” where you have a pipe that contains a mix of two or more states of matter like steam and liquid water, water and trash, sand and air. Handling multi-phase flows can be a real pain because you need to separate them but you don’t always know how much of each phase is present and they may be very well mixed. In steam pipes, separators are used to remove any liquid water from the gas flow, in flows with solid components filters or screens can be used to allow fluids to pass but in all cases there are complex parts or consumables.

And so the butthole is an absolute marvel of engineering, with only a single moving part it can separate a multi-phase flow into it’s constituent parts regardless of it’s orientation in space (most of the time).