For a sample of what to expect, see former Texas SBOE Chairman Don McLeroy on the Colbert Report a few days ago.

The Texas Monthly published a summary of the rave reviews for the film, which premiered last Saturday at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

We should try to meet up in front of the theater at about 6:30.

Tickets can be purchased online or at the box office. RSVP on Facebook.

P.S. If you still feel some of those pesky brain cells clogging up your cranium, there is still time to see American Juggalo tonight at the same theater.

Don’t forget Mary Roach on Wednesday.

On Saturday May 5th, our own Todd W will be running for his life, pursued by ravenous Zombies, all to promote vaccine research. Help support this worthy cause.

At last month’s SitP, we had an author as our guest and we asked a lot of fantastic questions. Let’s do it even better this time! Check out her web site and read this sample (from a NY Times op-ed), or better yet read the whole book. It is interesting and important even if it is scary enough to be a Halloween selection.

See the previous post for more about the book.

RSVP on our Facebook event page.

P.S. I got Mary Roach’s autograph (times 2) last night. She would have signed my Kindle as well, but we couldn’t find a Sharpie. Someone remember to bring a Sharpie to Book Club!

Our next book will be The Good News Club by Katherine Stewart. It is the story of how the Christian Right is attempting to use America’s public school system to proselytize our children and (as intended collateral damage) destroy the education system itself.

Ironic results of religious extremism

Stewart was not much concerned when a “nondenominational Bible study program” showed up as an after-school activity at her daughter’s public elementary school, but as she learned more, she became deeply worried. She discovered it was “just one small part of a much larger story that should be of concern to anyone who cares about the future of public education – or indeed the future of secular democracy – in the United States.”

In a strategy very reminiscent of the Discovery Institute’s promotion of Intelligent Design as a wedge issue to subvert the teaching of evolution in the public schools and insert religious doctrine into our science classes, an organization called the Child Evangelism Fellowship has been organizing “Good News Clubs” in elementary schools across the nation and around the world, to indoctrinate children (as young as possible; they start in kindergarten) in fundamentalist Christian ideology.

Thanks to a duplicitous Supreme Court decision (Good News Club v Milford Central School, 2001) based on the dubious proposition that 5-year-olds could clearly distinguish events and programs sponsored by their schools from those carried on in the schools (after hours, at the same time and often in the same rooms as legitimate after-school programs)and conducted often by teachers or teacher’s aides, sectarian religious groups must be granted the same access to public school property as any other outside community groups such as art and music programs, boy and girl scouts, community service organizations, and so forth.

While the adult club organizers aren’t allowed to proselytize on school grounds (except to children whose parents have given explicit written permission), nothing prevents the children from doing so, as they are encouraged to do by the clubs. The conflicts engendered between the children, the bullying and the shaming and the destruction of friendships, and subsequently the conflicts between their parents and within their community, can rapidly destroy the public spirit that supports the schools, causing people to cease to volunteer for school events, stop attending PTO meetings and stop supporting school fundraisers, and generally promote hatred and intolerance, as happened in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle in 2008. But this is all well and good to the religious right.

In 1979, Jerry Falwell made the agenda transparent: “I hope to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we don’t have public schools,” he said. “The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them.”

The first chapter of the book tells the story of the events in Seattle then and after. In the second chapter, Stewart attends a national convention of the CEF. Apart from drawing parallels to a multilevel marketing scheme, this chapter lacks the diverting whimsy of Jon Ronson’s attendance at Bohemian Grove and Bilderberg Group gatherings. It is all deeply disturbing. Their goal is to establish Good News clubs at all 65,000 public elementary schools in the US within the next 24 years. They are already in 3500 schools, about 6% penetration. They have a very detailed strategy for extending their reach. The casual bigotry, racism and homophobia exhibited at the convention is also horrifying.

I’ve only read the first two chapters so far, but skipped ahead to find out if there were any local connections to the book. I found two. The CEF’s target city in the fall of 2010 was Boston. Did anyone here notice? Did you have any run-ins with them? They do try to stay under the radar, at least until it’s too late. The second local connection is that Katherine Stewart attended the John D. Runkle School in Brookline, where our own Liz teaches!

We will be meeting at our usual place, the Harvard Northwest Science Building, 52 Oxford St, Cambridge (unless the weather is nice, in which case we’ll be meeting under the Giant Green Pepper, just north of Harvard Yard, between Memorial Hall and the Science Center) from 3 to 5 PM on Saturday, May 19th.

Please sign up at our Facebook event page (unless you’d rather not, but it does give us some idea of how many people to expect.) If you sign up to the Boston Skeptics Facebook group and then register for the event, you will get notified of any changes of schedule and of future events (maybe, it seems to be acting strangely at the moment.) So far as I know, we’ve never denied anyone membership who requested it, but who knows, you might be the first! I also (sometimes) attempt to Tweet reminders shortly before the event, though I have been remiss at this recently.

UPDATE: don’t bother with Facebook. They’ve broken it in such a way as to make it completely useless for group events like the Book Club and Skeptics in the Pub meetings.

The Good News is that we’ve joined the 21st Century, when everything changes. The Boston Skeptics Book Club has formed the nucleus of the Skepchick Book Club. Read Mary’s post to see how it all will work. Basically, there will be an on-line gathering to discuss the same book the day after our meeting. Everyone (local or distant) is invited to attend and discuss! Virtual snacks and drinks provided.

Mary Roach will be receiving the “Annual Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism” from the Harvard Secular Society and the American Humanist Association on Wednesday, April 25 at the Harvard Science Center.

Mary is the reigning record-holder as 3-time Boston Skeptics Book Club author (Spook, Packing for Mars and Stiff.) Maybe I can get her to autograph my Kindle?

Tickets (free) and details are available from the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy.

—

On Saturday, May 12, the Cape Ann Skeptics will be sponsoring Skepticamp Cape Ann in Gloucester. This one day, free event will be from 9:30 until 4:00 in LaTrattoria, a downtown Gloucester restaurant. See their web site for full details.

A few of us ventured into the wilds of New Hampshire for the Granite State Skepticamp last October, and had a great time. Gloucester is closer and has many fewer bears, so I highly recommend it.

Mathematics is a dirty business, but somebody has to do, preferably while covered with a sticky mass of Pie Filling! (The volume of a pie is 4⁄3×π×((R_t+R_b)⁄2)²×h, where R_t is the radius of the top of the pie, and R_b is the radius of the bottom of the pie and h is the thickness of the pie.)

Armed and dangerous

A map, maybe.

The weather forecast is for clear with a high of 56, so be prepared for freezing drizzle or heat and humidity.

RSVP

Update: Bad Geometry! I forgot to multiply by the depth of the pie. Also, the Greek letter lowercase pi looks really awful in the default font. Sort of like a poorly drawn lowercase “n”. I said math is a dirty business; there’s your proof.

Her talk will tell the story of our electric infrastructure–where it came from, how it works today, and how it will have to change to meet the needs of a new generation.

Ms Koerth-Baker has written a new book called “Before the Lights Go Out” about

“some of the big-picture nuance that gets left out of the day-to-day chatter about energy. What are the big trends that will shape what we can and can’t do over the next 40 years? How does our electricity infrastructure work, and why is that infrastructure a lot more interesting (and a lot more complicated) than most laypeople realize? There’s a lot of storytelling, and some fun and funny history of how our current infrastructure came to be. There’s critical analysis explaining both why we have to solve our energy problem, and why solving it is going to be harder than many climate hawks want to believe. In general, the book is meant to make a confusing subject accessible and offer a more nuanced perspective on a topic that tends to be very ideology driven.”

The book will be published April 10. (Update: Some advanced copies will be available.)

Several of the back-cover reviews are by people who should be very familiar to members of the Boston Skeptics Book Club. Mary Roach (Stiff, Spook and Packing for Mars) called it, “a fine, cracking read.” Carl Zimmer (Parasite Rex) says, “Maggie Koerth-Baker is one of the most innovative science writers at work today. Rather than settling for cheap flash, she burrows deep into many of the biggest mysteries in science and technology and comes out with wonderfully clear explanations”.

Many of the subjects that skeptics deal with, like ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot and ESP, are amusing examples of fallacious reasoning and illuminate interesting flaws in perception and the human brain, but, except in the cases of rare individuals, have no important effect on most people’s lives. But a few subjects, such as energy generation, storage and distribution, are areas where science and technology meet society in profound and important ways. I would class it with alternative medicine and religious fundamentalism and their interference with science (particularly in their denial of biology and evolution) and AGW denialism as important topics for applying critical thinking.

When discussing these topics, it is essential to start with a firm factual basis, which is what Ms Koerth-Baker’s book promises to provide.

Please come hear this important talk.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is both a freelancer and the science editor at BoingBoing.net, one of the most widely read blogs in the U.S. Her work has appeared in print publications like Discover, Popular Science, and New Scientist, and online at websites like Scientific American and National Geographic News.

We will be meeting a week later than usual, on April 2, at 7 PM at Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square. RSVP on our Facebook event page.

Meanwhile, if this subject is too depressing (it shouldn’t be, since we can and will eventually solve it, the only questions being at what cost and who pays), look at the lizards!

How we'll look while enjoying our next meeting

I usually forget to promote the snacks in my Book Club announcements, possibly due to the fact that books usually involve parasites, corpses, zombies, medical experimentation or nasty chemicals, but they are a highlight of the meetings. Today, Mary brought delicious, low-fat, low-calorie chocolate chip muffins. (I ate four.) Please bring a snack or your appetite or both. We always have left-overs, so don’t feel shy if you just come and eat (and discuss the book, of course. Or just sit in the corner and be amused by the obscure Star Trek references that always sneak in.)

Back to the book… I haven’t started to read it yet[*], but according to the Amazon description, it “tackl[es] such colorful topics as cannibalism, humor, and pornography.” How could it go wrong? The few reviews so far are all very positive. It was just published in January (“That book is so two weeks ago”), so unfortunately there’s no paperback edition yet, so if you are poor, think of it as an opportunity to get up close and personal with your local library.

Date: April 7, 2012
Time: 3:00 to 6:00 (ish) PM
Location: Unless it is spectacularly nice out, the first floor conference room at the north end of the Northwest Science Building at Harvard. (52 Oxford St, Cambridge MA.)

Please feel free to RSVP on our Facebook event page if you’re not socialmediaphobic.

[*] Actually, I have, thanks to Kindle’s instant gratification mode. The 2nd paragraph of the Preface contains a description of the National Rotten Sneakers Contest. I think we have a winner!

Don't let the snow get you down, come to Book Club!

Don’t let the weather keep you cooped up, come over and socialize with the Boston Skeptics as we discuss Richard Wiseman’s Paranormality. We are meeting at 3pm today in Conference Room 169 in the Northwest Building at Harvard (see last month’s post for directions). Bring a snack if you wish (I’m bringing home-brewed beer and freshly-baked chocolate chip muffins). See you soon!