I enjoy watching all the people. The ones called really are a cross section of the population. There was everyone there from college students to retired people and from all ethnic groups. We weren't the beautiful people but just who you would see walking down the street or shopping in the grocery store.

There was a post doc there from the University of Arizona who handed out a questionnaire on skin cancer to anyone who would fill it out. That's a good idea. She definitely has a captive audience. I filled it out as did several others. I spent the rest of the day reading, and when I felt stir crazy, walking up and down the hall outside. I went through three magazines and finished a book.

The book was "The Culture of Fear" by Barry Glassner. It was an excellent look at how we are terrified of dangers that are very low probability while ignoring dangers that are very high. A good example is that many people are afraid of flying and most people feel that flying is dangerous, but more than three times as many people die from auto accidents in one year than have died from airplane accidents in this century. Many people who will not fly, will blithely get in their car and drive all over town.

He brought out that road rage is very, very low, unlike what we hear on the news. The chances of being killed by someone who is committing a crime is also very, very low, unless you are a black male. While white people tend to fear black males, the white people are very unlikely to get killed by a black man. The people who have to fear being killed by a black man are other black men. We really don't realize how dangerous life is for black males, especially young black males.

He goes through disease, and what we think are disease and how little we really know, from the news, what is really dangerous or even probable, and what isn't. Your child is very unlikely to be kidnapped by a sexual predator, and is very unlikely to meet one on the internet, and will virtually never meet one in person. They are in more danger from one trip to school in the family car than running into a sexual predator in their entire life.

This isn't to say we shouldn't protect our children, but that we need to not panic over their safety and look more carefully at what are the true dangers they face. Right now the panic is over school shootings, and it is bad. Today there was another, but their chances of being shot at school, or anywhere is very, very small. There is too much in this book to talk about it all and I did have some quibbles about what his emphasis was in some cases, but overall it's a very thought provoking book.

I walked around downtown at noon. It was a lovely cool day and I always like downtowns at lunch hours as they are such a hustle and bustle. I stopped at the library and got a book, but didn't really enjoy it and quit reading part of the way through. Lunch was milk and crackers from a store so I could sit outside and enjoy the weather.

I ran through all my reading material and my seat hurt before they finally let us go a quarter till five. They called several groups and there were just a small number of us left by 1:30 or 2:00 but we just sat there in case they needed more people. It's the not being able to go anywhere that's irritating. They need to give us beepers so we can wander around a little more. I'm tired from just sitting there all day but it was nice to catch up on my magazines.