Skin cancer, possession by demons, whatever.

MSNBC, on hair stylists noticing signs of skin cancer:

Most people make 10 visits or more a year to see their hair dressers and barbers and they tend to look more carefully for mold and legions on the scalp.

Emphasis mine.

Have you herd of immunity?

A new survey, reported at the Science-Based Medicine blog, reveals concerns that parents have about vaccination:

11% – vaccines are given to prevent diseases children are not likely to get

Similarly, I’ve been wasting time and money by regularly filling my car with gasoline, even though it has never run empty once! Clearly, the threat of empty fuel tanks is a conspiracy promulgated by soulless minions of orthodoxy.

Related: Candice Burns Hoffmann, a press officer for the [CDC], said in a release that the United States was experiencing “the highest number of measles cases since 1996,” in large part because of unvaccinated travelers recently returned from overseas.

Risk or selection effect?

Kaiser Fung at Numbers Rule Your World, on the European E. coli outbreak:

One other point: the level of risk is not the same for everyone. Most E-coli fatalities in past outbreaks have been elderly women or children with already compromised immune systems. In this case, 13 of 19 deaths were adult women, a little unusual but still a concentration of risk among a subset of the population. (link)

Just like a lot of situations, the "average" risk is not useful here. It's important to know if you are in the high-risk subgroup or not.

Are women more susceptible to the infection, or do they just eat more sprouts? My anecdotal experience (also, admittedly, on a different continent) suggests the latter.

Router flu strikes again

Local blogger Angela documented an outbreak of router flu in the area.

Within minutes of reading her account of the flu, my previously-stable router spontaneously rebooted.

Hide yo routers, hide yo switches.

10 Things I’ve Done That You Probably Have Not

Based on John Scalzi's list, with the same caveats.

1. Skipped an art history lecture to have ice cream with Whit Diffie.
2. Been run off the sidewalk by Stephen Hawking. I have no idea how he got a license to drive that chair.
3. Seen the aurora borealis and Omega Centauri from the same place.
4. Helped a town clean up after a tornado.
5. Put an endangered Whooping Crane in a headlock.
6. Attended the U.S. Space Academy (“Space Camp”).
7. Appeared on the Discovery Channel.
8. Been administered Immunoglobulin G.
9. Watched a SpaceShipOne launch from the back yard. On my birthday.
10. Drove my car stupid fast on an abandoned WW2 airstrip, with grass growing through the pavement and cattle wandering across the course.

FAIL FAIL #2: Two wrongs don’t make a right

I love the FAIL Blog. But sometimes they FAIL to understand the topic being mocked. This is the second in an investigative series exploring FAIL Blog FAILs.

“Per” in a prescription means “by” or “through” (cf. Per aspera ad astra). It does not mean “for each.”