Just a quick announcement here:
The ScienceBlogs Book Club is back up and running, and this time the book under discussion is the latest by that Dark Lord of Vaccination himself, that Darth Vader to the antivaccinationist Luke Skywalker, otherwise known as Satan Incarnate to Jenny McCarthy, J.B. Handley, Andrew Wakefield, Dan Olmsted, and the crew of antivaccinationists spreading misinformation and endangering public health and promoting an amazing panoply of quackery to "cure" autism, Dr. Paul Offit. The book under discussion is Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure, and it's one I highly recommend. In fact, I'm participating in the Book Club, and my review of the book is scheduled to post automatically this afternoon at the Book Club; so don't miss it. I'll be monitoring the comments there, starting after work today.
In the meantime, to whet your appetite and kick the discussion off, Dr. Offit himself has posted an introduction to the Book Club discussing his book. Over the next ten days, we hope to stimulate lots of discussion of the book, and 50 readers have received a free copy to review and discuss. Starting tomorrow or Friday and continuing until October 10, I will be periodically posting to the Book Club blog, as will Dr. Offit himself; Kristina Chew, PhD, author of the blog Autism Vox; Kev Leitch, founder of the blog Left Brain, Right Brain and currently one of its major bloggers; Bob Park, PhD, a University of Maryland physics professor and author of the weekly online column, What's New by Bob Park; and yours truly, that cranky, arrogant, Plexiglass box of multicolored blinking lights with a bad attitude and a penchant for deconstructing the B.S. that antivaccinationists regularly lay down. I'll also be sure to post an announcement right here every time I post to the Book Club and include a link to the relevant post.
Finally, comments to this post (and all posts pointing to the Book Club) will be closed. I'n doing this not because I don't want discussion (I most certainly do), but because for the next ten days I want discussions relevant to Dr. Offit's book to occur at The ScienceBlogs Book Club, not here.
Ready? Head on over! Maybe we can get David Kirby or Dan Olmsted to show up. They've both got a lot of explaining to do.