Morning has cracked, rather than broken

Another day dawns, grudgingly, over Wolverhampton. Yesterday finished in a mixture of joy and tears: my mother was meant to appear with various household items, but instead spent several hours by the roadside waiting for the AA, having filled the diesel tank with petrol - a very expensive error. No doubt my dad is slightly peeved, but he's done it more than once, as I hope mother reminds him.

After that, it was off to Marcus Brigstocke, and his God Collar routine. He is, quite simply, a very funny man with an interestingly varied career for a posh bloke. Eating disorders, working on oil rigs, podium dancer at the Ministry of Sound, Oxbridge and an excellent line in angry, witty liberalism. That's harder than it sounds, by the way: it's easy to be an angry, witty lefty, but expounding satirical disappointment with the world while trying to see every point of view can leave you in danger of having no clear line. Not Marcus. He'd like to believe in god, but can't quite manage it - the show is essentially his exploration of apologetic atheism and the various inconsistencies which mark religion as a bundle of common sense mixed up with weirdo mumbo-jumbo. Highly recommended. He does have a thing about circumcision though, and plots to make the interval specially uncomfortable for the gentlemen by asking them to check, while standing at the urinals, who's been telling the truth…

Cut and dried (in another sense)

The Guardian reported the other day that circumcision (much more common in the US than in the UK) reduces the risk of contracting AIDS, according to double-blind trials.

Ben Goldacre, who writes a column in the Guardian about the media's reporting of science, amongst other things, takes issue with this report most amusingly:

Dear Editor,

your reporter Alex Renton claims there are double-blind trials to show that circumcision reduces the transmission of HIV. In a double-blind trial, neither the researcher nor the participant know whether they have had the intervention, in this case “circumcision”. However distracted I am by the lack of basic scientific literacy in British news media, I feel certain that if somebody cut the skin at the end of my penis off, I would notice, if not immediately, then at some stage in the years that followed.

Yours

Ben Goldacre
(Bad Science)