Alan Cassels wrote Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease, which is all:

Why wouldn’t you want to be screened to see if you’re at risk for cancer, heart disease, or another potentially lethal condition? After all, better safe than sorry. Right?

Not so fast, says Alan Cassels. His Seeking Sickness takes us inside the world of medical screening, where well-meaning practitioners and a profit-motivated industry offer to save our lives by exploiting our fears. He writes that promoters of screening overpromise on its benefits and downplay its harms, which can range from the merely annoying to the life threatening. If you’re facing a screening test for breast or prostate cancer, high cholesterol, or low testosterone, someone is about to turn you into a patient. You need to ask yourself one simple question: Am I ready for all the things that could go wrong?

Desiree Schell will interview Alan Cassels before a live internet audience on Skeptically Speaking this Sunday night. Details here.

Brian Clegg, author of A Brief History of Infinity: The Quest to Think the Unthinkable, was the guest on Skeptically Speaking last Sunday. I’m sorry I missed it, but I was recovering from several days hanging out with the very host of that show mostly working and hardly sleeping.

It will be available for download some time today (should be up by now).

Click here to get to the download link: #172 A Brief History of Infinity

Using a base ten numbering system. In another numbering system, it is a different numeral.

Farida Afridi was a Pakistani activist who advocated for women and social change was hunted down and killed a few days ago, while traveling from her home in Tehsil Jamrud Ghundi Kali to her office in Hayatabad. She was 25.

The story is here, and Ophelia Benson has more here.

Available now for download:

Skeptically Speaking #171 Ask A Pharmacist

We’re back live this week, and we’re giving you the chance to Ask a Pharmacist. Ontario pharmacist Scott Gavura is the founder and editor of Science-Based Pharmacy, and a contributor to Science-Based Medicine. He’ll be answering audience questions for the full hour.

Click Here and follow links to download

I am not happy with this NPR title: Will Medicaid Bring The Uninsured Out Of The Woodwork?.

Dear New York Times: The uninsured are not in the woodwork. They are in pain. They are in trouble. They are in debt. They are not in the woodwork. Cockroaches are in the woodwork. The uninsured are not.

I have a friend who was badly injured last winter. She’s always been either a full time student or had a job. Her jobs as far as I know are always helping people in some way, usually working with youth, either education-related or working with kids at risk. That is what her schooling is about at all, too; Youth, social justice, etc. etc. But, by chance, her injury came at a period in her life when she was between insurance-providing jobs (though she was working multiple part time jobs) and school is so expensive that she was also between paid up semesters. I was with her when she was injured. It was something like December (I’d have to check). Her injury required surgery.

Unfortunately, she was not covered by any sort of insurance and the sorts of things that needed to be done were not available via the usual routes. She knew she’d be able to get a job soon, as she was looking, qualified, and had some good leads. It seemed likely that one of her part time jobs might pan out to a full time job with benefits. Eventually, this Spring, she was hired for full time employment (working with kids at risk in the Twin Cities). Then the required waiting period before you get actual medical coverage even though you have medical coverage went by, and she got an appointment with a doctor, then the right kind of doctor, then the surgeon, and then made the appointment to go under the knife.

Her surgery is tomorrow. She did not crawl out of the woodwork. She was not in the woodwork for the last six months. She was in pain. She was in pain the whole time, Mr. New York Times.

I am totally bringing her chicken soup.

(Note: Sorry, I thought the piece was from the NYT, not NPR because I was reading both at the same time … thus the slug.)

So a Girl Walks into a Comedy Club….

…
“So, on Friday night my friend and I were at her house and wanted to get out and do something for the evening. We brainstormed ideas and she brought up the idea of seeing a show at the Laugh Factory. I’d never been, I thought it sounded fun, so we went. [and saw] Daniel Tosh, …

So Tosh then starts making some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape is hilarious, etc. …. So I yelled out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”

… After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if …

OMG, I can’t believe what he said. Read it here.

Almost three in four of Americans accept recent global warming, according to a new poll conducted for the Washington Post and Stanford University — but only three in ten agree that it is mainly due to human activity.

Asked “Do you think that the world’s temperature probably has been going up [“slowly” was used with half of the sample] over the past 100 years, or do you think this probably has not been happening?” 73% of respondents said yes, 25% of respondents said no, and 2% indicated that they didn’t know or refused to answer.

That’s from the NCSE

Here’s the study (PDF)

A new climate change video by greenman3510:

There is a new book coming out called How We Know What We Know about Our Changing Climate: Scientists and Kids Explore Global Warming. Here is a description:

When the weather changes daily, how do we really know that Earth’s climate is changing? Here is the science behind the headlines – evidence from flowers, butterflies, birds, frogs, trees, glaciers and much more, gathered by scientists from all over the world, sometimes with assistance from young “citizen-scientists.” And here is what young people, and their families and teachers, can do to learn about climate change and take action. Climate change is a critical and timely topic of deep concern, here told in an age-appropriate manner, with clarity and hope. Kids can make a difference! This book combines the talents of two uniquely qualified authors: Lynne Cherry, the leading children’s environmental writer/illustrator and author of The Great Kapok Tree, and Gary Braasch, award-winning photojournalist and author of Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming is Changing the World.

And HERE, courtesy of the National Center for Science Education, is a free chapter from that book. Enjoy.

A talk by Genie Scott of the NCSE.

Do reason and creationism ever intersect? What reasons do creationists cite in explaining their beliefs? Genie Scott examines how “reason” is misunderstood and misused by creationists. When: 4/15/2012. Where: Global Atheist Convention, Melbourne, Australia

The question has been asked: What was the sex ratio of attendees of the recent SkepchickCON Track at CONvergence, and of the panelists? To this it would be nice (and appropriate) to add the same questions for CONvergence as a whole. I have some, but not all, of that information.

I looked at the panelist sex ratio by examining every Skepchick run panel on the CONvergnece schedule, and adjusted where I know for who actually was on the panel (it is usually the same but now and then things turn out differently). To sample panels at CONvergence, I simply examined the CONvergence panel immediately after the Skepchick organized panel on the schedule listing, and if the Skepchick panel was the last one, I looked at the one before that. For each time slot, these panels are listed alphabetically so this probably represents a good unbiased pair. This may have errors and it is uncorrected, but the numbers are stark so I’m not worried about false conclusions being drawn if there is an error here and there.

I looked at 17 panels that I could identify as Skepchick organized from the schedule and one panel that was not on he schedule (the last one) but that I knew about (that was the only one not on the schedule). I counted the sex ratio as 29 males to 55 females (1.9) for Skepchick organized panels, and the sex ratio as 32 males to 29 females (0.91) for non-Skepchick CON panels.

As I understand it, it is Skepchick policy to have mostly females on panels, or an even sex ratio, but occasionally one ends up with more males. All the panels I was on or sat and observed were pretty darn good panels except one, which was an embarrassing waste of time, and that one was four guys with a female moderator who is the best in the world but still could not save it. So, yeah, there may be something to avoiding panels with mostly guys.

I have no idea what the sex ratio of the CON attendees might have been, and I have no idea what the sex ratio of the non Skepchick-organized panels might have been. Actually, I have no idea what the sex ratio of attendees of the Skepchick panels was either but I counted boys and girls in three photographs of the audiences, all taken before panels started and people were still wandering in, and found a total of 52 males and 34 females (0.65). That, however, is a very limited sampling and I wouldn’t read much into it. Or maybe boys like to watch girls, I dunno.