Our next book will be The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer by David Leavitt. The Amazon reviews on this book are mixed, but I think we’ll enjoy it. Most of the negative reviews focus on it being too mathematical, but if I recall correctly, most of us found our previous math oriented book, The Calculus Diaries, lacking in actual math. (What can I say, we’re hardcore nerds.) We might end up agreeing with a couple of other negative reviewers who found it not rigorous enough or who focus on a small number of mistakes or misunderstandings, but most of the reviews found Leavitt’s explanations very cogent, and the book itself a good mix of the biography, history, math and the tragic consequences of the extreme homophobia that ruled much of the last century.

A Computer

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.) It seems to be working again; I guess last month’s rant was effective.

[1] No, Al Gore never claimed to have invented the Algorithm, any more than he claimed to invent the Internet.

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.

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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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Our book this month is The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. It appears to be a fairly quick and fun read, so it’s not to late to start it! Even if you haven’t, we always value uninformed opinions :-)

Bring a snack to share or at very least, bring your appetite! No coffee this month (sorry), unless someone else steps up to the plate.

Place: Harvard Yard
Time: 3:00 PM Saturday July 9, 2011