"I mean she was really scary," he adds. "Physically, I'm not that big. I was really scared."

Although Nguyen himself was the victim of a random pick-up, he did not include his own experience in his data. But he did have a hypothesis for why she approached him.

"I think she picked me up because I looked pretty non-threatening," Nguyen says, noting that he had heard before that women are more likely to approach men who are doing crossword puzzles or exhibiting other passive behaviors.

Urinary Tracks

Dave Barry may be known as a kidder, but this time he might be reporting the truth.

When Kristofer M. Helgen '01 and David M. Kallin '01 were forwarded a quiz via e-mail about urinal behavior--complete with stick figures for illustration--taken from Barry's Complete Guide to Guys, they set out to the Lamont men's restroom to see if he was right.

For their Anthropology 106 project, the two decided to study men's urinal behavior.

"What we were studying was proximity avoidance by males in the bathroom," Helgen says.

The pair's hypothesis was that men would choose the urinal the farthest from the one another man occupied when given a choice. They based this on the fact that male primates are prone to violence when confronted with another male and thus keep their distance.

"In the bathroom, it's a sensitive time because you will be alone with males who will be strangers to you," Helgen says. "Males are going to avoid each other."

The place where the pair chose to study the "urination events" (UEs), as they called them, was the men's bathroom on the fifth floor of Lamont Library. The bathroom was a particularly prime spot because there are five identical urinals, all equally spaced, with no dividers. They numbered them one through five, with one being closest to the door.

Helgen and Kallin would set-up at a desk by the bathroom door and follow people into the bathroom.

"First we looked at primary choice, when there was no one standing at the urinals," Helgen says. "While there appeared to be a preference for the outer urinals, one and five, it was more or less random."

To help with their study of secondary, tertiary and other choices, Helgen enlisted the services of some of his friends from the Harvard Glee Club.

The group would plant one or more people at the urinals to see where unsuspecting users would choose to do their business.