If you attended the Skepticamp New Hampshire last October, you’ll fondly remember being astounded by Ethan Brown, the amazing Mathemagician. If you missed that chance, you can pay the big bucks to see him again at NECCS in April. Or you can see him for free right here in Cambridge this month at the elegant and comfortable Upstairs at Tommy Doyle’s Pub in Harvard Square. Ethan is the author of the popular and mystifying Cool Math Sfuff blog.

We will be meeting at the usual time and place (more or less), Upstairs at Tommy Doyle’s at 96 Winthrop Street (Harvard Square), on Monday, January 30, 2012 at 7:00 PM.

RSVP on our Facebook event page.

Our next book will be Richard Wiseman’s “Paranormality”. We will be meeting at the same Book Time, same Book Place, on Saturday, February 11. I’ll be updating this post with more details shortly.

How do HeLas keep in touch? ... Cell Phones. OK, I know that was really bad, but did you know there are a dearth of jokes about HeLa cells?

Today we’re meeting in our usual conference room (#169 in the Northwest Building, 52 Oxford St, Harvard Campus, directions here) at 3pm to discuss HeLa cells and the life of Henrietta Lacks.
I don’t have any cell-themed treats to bring, but I will be making some yummy chocolate chip scones to go with John’s coffee! Everyone is welcome, and please bring a snack if you can. Skeptics away!

In what is becoming a tradition, we’ll be fighting the good fight against the Christmas traditions by celebrating them to max. Actually, we’ll be doing a Yankee Swap and socializing.

We’re a week early this month (due to the dread “Ch” word), but at the usual time and place, Tommy Doyle’s Irish Pub in Harvard Square, 7 to 9 PM on Monday, December 19, 2011. Please bring a small, geeky, nerdy, cheap (under $10) skeptical gift so you can participate in the Swap, but if you’d rather not, then just come and socialize and laugh as the participants try to strategize. (I got an awesome pirate skull mug last year.)

RSVP on Facebook, if that’s your thing.

Our next book is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It is the story of HeLa cells, the first immortal cell line which has been and continues to be used extensively in many fields, including cancer research, vaccine development and testing, AIDS, aging, genetics, and the effects of radiation on living cells. It is also the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor African American woman raised as a share-cropper on a Virginia tobacco farm who died a horrible death from cancer at age 30 in 1951. It is also the story of her family who only found out about the source of the HeLa cell line many years later. (Informed consent was apparently never sought or obtained.)

The book promises many topics for discussion, including medical history, cutting edge cancer and vaccine research, medical ethics and the exploitation of poor people for medical research, history of the underclasses in America, the importance of science education, and the current health care situation. (Many of Henrietta’s descendants can’t afford to receive the treatments derived from her cells, should they develop those diseases!)

Skloot worked with the Lacks family, particularly with Henrietta’s daughter Deborah to obtain their side of the story and to help them in their personal search for answers.

The book has received excellent reviews, both on-line and from friends, and I am looking forward to reading it.

We will be meeting on Saturday, January 14, 2012 at 3 PM, most likely in the same conference room in the Northwest Science Building at Harvard that we have used recently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Lefkowitz

http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/Profile/gl/mlefkowitz.html

Come join us at 3pm in the Northwest Building at the Harvard Campus (52 Oxford St, Cambridge, MA). We’re booked in Conference Room 169 and if you ask the guards in the front of the building they will let you know where to go. Or you can just follow the directions here.

Come and listen to the various (and true) ways in which the Earth may meet its end as we discuss Phil Plait’s Death from the Skies. Fortunately, the End Isn’t Near! (Now, who’s going to correct all those people with the signs?) Bring a snack if you want and come join us this afternoon.

Dr. Mary Lefkowitz is Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Emerita at Wellesley College. She is the author of Not Out of Africa, Black Athena Revisited*, and History Lesson. She has also written several books about ancient Greece, including Women in Greek Myth and Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Myths and many others.

She will be talking about the “Black Athena Controversy”, the notion that Greek culture was stolen or borrowed from Egypt, and her attempts to talk about evidence-based history in the era of post-modernism and political correctness.

If this subject is new to you, as it is to me, having skillfully avoided academia in the 1980s and 90s, I recommend doing some background reading, or at least a bit of googling, in advance. (One of the Amazon reviews of one of her books compared arguing with Afro-centrists to arguing with anti-vaxxers, a conflict I’m more familiar with.)

We’re back to our usual place and time this month, upstairs at Tommy Doyle’s on Monday, November 28 at 7 PM.

Feel free to sign up on our Facebook event page.

[*] which she edited with Guy Rogers, though for some reason the Amazon page doesn’t mention him.

The world didn’t end two weeks ago, but it could happen at any time!

Our December book (if we survive that long) will be Phil Plait’s Death From the Skies.

We will be meeting at our usual winter quarters, in Harvard’s Northwest Science Building, 52 Oxford St, Cambridge, at 3 PM Saturday, December 3. We’ll either be in the cafeteria on the 1st floor at the south end of the building, or in the conference room at the north end.

Mary posted directions last month.

Sign up on the Facebook event page if you are so inclined.

Meanwhile, for your further enterrortainment, here’s the short version of the book.