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.

P.S. You can also follow Ethan on Twitter and join his Facebook fan page.

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.

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.

Our next SitP features two special guests (Mark Crislip and Kimball Atwood of Science Based Medicine) at a special time (8 PM) on a special day (Wednesday, October 19 instead of our usual Monday evening), and in a special place (the cozy, intimate basement of Tommy Doyle’s.) Aren’t we special?

Kimball and Mark will make a brief presentation followed by lots of hanging out and talking. For some ideas of the discussion topics, be sure to check out Mark’s podcast QuackCast and Kimball’s Naturowatch site, as well as SBM.

(Be forewarned! Tommy Doyle’s basement doesn’t have the state-of-the-art multimedia recording facilities of their upstairs room, so this may be your only chance to see this dynamic duo. Don’t miss it!)

Important Update! Note date and time change.

Our next book club meeting will be on Saturday, November 5 at 5 PM at one of the usual places. (Today, we met indoors in a nice conference room with left-over bagels at the far end of our usual building, due to scheduling conflicts and iffy weather.) Stay tuned for updates.

We decided to change the time to 5 PM date to November 5 so that people could attend both the Granite State Skeptics Skepticamp and the Book Club meeting.

Our book is going to be 3-time winner Mary Roach’s Stiff, in honor of Halloween.

Our guest speaker this month is Amanda Knief, Government Relations Manager of the Secular Coalition for America. Amanda will tell us “true tales of working as an atheist on Capitol Hill and with the Obama administration, and also how we need everyone to get involved.”

Could there be a better lead-in to Zombie and Vampire Season than the inside scoop on working in Washington?

We will be meeting at our regular time and place, at 7 PM on Monday, September 26. 2011, upstairs at Tommy Doyle’s, 96 Winthrop St in Harvard Square.

Our book club meeting this month is again at the usual place and time, 3 PM Saturday August 13 on the lawn just north of Harvard Yard, between Memorial Hall (the big ugly pseudo gothic building) and the Science Center (the big ugly modern building that looks like a flight of giant stairs to nowhere.) It’s supposed to be warm and sunny, but if it rains, we’ll move indoors to the cafeteria of the Northwest building up Oxford Street just past the museum.

The book is about the birth of forensic science (CSI: Lyon, as in Lyon, France, circa 1894.) I’m about 1/2 way through, the prime suspect is about to go to trial, and is attempting an insanity defense. It’s a pretty compelling story, all the more so because it’s true. The author alternates chapters between the story of the criminal, Joesph Vacher, and the history of forensics, mostly focusing on Professor Lacassagne of the Lyon Medical School, who was the leading forensic scientist of the time.

Dave is the president of the American Humanist Association.. Skeptical activism was a major theme at TAM 9 a few weeks ago and Dave will fill us in on the broad strategic issues facing the AHA and other secular groups, as well as the status of a recent lawsuit involving the AHA and the pledge of allegiance.

Agree or disagree with the proposition the the Skeptical and Secular Movements should be more involved in social activism[*], this promises to be an extremely interesting talk.

Date: Monday, August 29
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Upstairs at Tommy Doyle’s
96 Winthrop St (Harvard Square)
Cambridge, MA

[*] If you disagree, you’re wrong :-)

Jonathan says:

NASA’s Space Shuttle is being retired this month after three decades of ups and downs both literal and metaphorical.

I’ll take a trip down memory lane and review what the Shuttles did and didn’t do, and discuss other spaceplanes past and present. Finally, I’ll speculate about what’s next for the US human spaceflight program.

Jonathan is a long-time member of the Boston Skeptics, an astronomer, and expert on space travel. He writes a monthly column for Sky and Telescope and maintains the Jonathan’s Space Report web site. He previously spoke to us about the history of the Moon Race, in a very interesting, informative and popular talk, especially about the little-known Soviet moon program. Be sure to arrive early so you can get a seat in front!

RSVP on Facebook

When: Monday, July 25 at 7pm

Where: Upstairs at Tommy Doyle’s Irish Pub,
Harvard Square

See you all there!