Bidet Buffs: Could the French Be Right?

Two people declare that they “miss it very much� when they travel. “It has elevated my mood,� another warmly writes. It even started a fight in one family’s bathroom, when Dad hogged it instead of letting 4-year-old Jimmy have his turn.

We won’t venture too closely into the personal lives of others, except to declare: Wow! Who would have thought that a bidet could touch peoples’ hearts this way? Have the French been right all along? Have we indeed been deprived?

Not that the Hydrogiene CTX Intimate Personal Hygiene System doesn’t sound cunning: It fits right onto a regular toilet, spraying water where it’s needed, so that “absolute freshness and natural cleanliness are assured 100% of the time.� It’s safe, say its makers, for children! It’s even theft-resistant! What’s more, the CTX has not one nozzle, but three. There’s the smallest, the cleansing nozzle, which sprays upward for intimate hygiene. There’s the water therapy nozzle, designed to provide relief from the soreness of hemorrhoids. Finally, there’s the heavy-duty sitz bath nozzle, which will “spray the entirety of posterior areas,� should that be what you desire.

All right. We think we’ve heard enough.

Truth Is, Doctors Rode Scientists’ Coattails

The next time you’re watching a movie--one of those old mad-scientist-in-white-lab-coat movies--you can really annoy your friends.

“This scene in the lab is just totally inaccurate,� you can drawl. “I thought everyone knew that lab coats, up till--oh, at least the mid-1800s--were beige, not white.� If you craftily conceal your well-thumbed copy of the Journal of the American Medical Assn., noone will know where you got the info.

Back in the 19th century, so the medical journal admits, people thought doctors were quacks. Scientists, meanwhile, were deemed noble, upstanding figures. Scientists wore lab coats. Lab coats were beige. Docs started wearing beige lab coats to feed off the noble scientists’ respectability.

Somewhere along the way, someone decided the coats should be white.

These days, though, there’s a reaction against that old white coat because it seems too cold, too aloof. Most doctors in Scandinavia and many U.S. psychiatrists and pediatricians have abandoned it altogether. If it goes on like this, how will we know who to believe in those TV fiber ads?

Ah, So This Is What Researchers Do

Perhaps you’ve occasionally wondered what members of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society get up to. Here’s some of what we discovered:

One pair of researchers just completed a survey of people crossing the road at five Miami Beach intersections. They made videos. Took notes. Conducted interviews.

Older people, they found, take longer to cross the street. What’s more, they conclude, “a major cause of the difficulties of older pedestrians can be attributed to physical limitations.�

Meanwhile, another ergonomics researcher is crunching out mathematical formulas to help bosses measure the ergonomic efficiency of their office staff. Such studies are still in their infancy nearly a century after a pioneering workplace study made the remarkable conclusion that “the faster the motions, the more the output.�

“In functional terms, an office worker is an asset to an organization as is a piece of office equipment, such as a photocopier,� our author astutely notes.