A much better picture of Ethan

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.

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.)

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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.

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.

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!)

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.

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.

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.

Not only was the 1890′s the birth of medical forensics and modern autopsy and other investigative techniques, and also of psychiatry (alienists, as the psychiatrists were then called), but also of yellow journalism, so there is loads source material. Some of it, like much of news today, is thoroughly bogus, invented to sell papers (and to deliver eyeballs to advertisers), made up out of sheer speculation or completely repetitive and derivative, but there were some journalists who seemed to do a really good job, interviewing witnesses and people who had crossed paths with Vacher, and discovering which ones told consistent stories that meshed with others, and which seemed only to be trying to get their 15 minutes. Starr seems to have done a good job, 115 years later, of separating the sheep from the goats, to use a herding metaphor. Of course, I haven’t actually followed up on any of his copious source notes, but they are there for any rare individual who might be skeptical. :-)

My biggest problem so far has been keeping track of all the people, victims, witnesses, scientists, doctors, police investigators, prosecutors, and journalists. There are lots of them! But it is fascinating so far. One interesting tidbit is the use of brand-new X-rays to determine if Vacher still had bullet fragments (the result of a failed murder/suicide attempt) lodged in his brain that might have affected his behavior. (This time period was also the birth of neurology.)

I hope to finish it before the meeting, but it will be fun to discuss even if I haven’t. If you are a fan of scientific history, murder mysteries, police procedurals, Law and Order, CSI, Silent Witness, Cold Case, Bones, Waking the Dead or a zillion others, even if you haven’t read or only started reading the book, please come. We always have great discussions! And remember to bring a snack to share; Dirt Cakes would be particularly appropriate as we discuss autopsies.

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 :-)

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.

Hello, Earthlings!

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!

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When: Monday, July 25 at 7pm

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

See you all there!