Sid Rodrigues, the host of the London event series, Skeptics in the Pub and writer for The Skeptic magazine, was in Boston Monday night to give a brief history of Skeptics in the Pub and to talk about his own experiences with debunking, refuting, and laughing at pseudoscience.

Skeptics in the Pub, started in 1999, has been going strong and gaining momentum in the UK for close to a decade. As Sid puts in, Skeptics is a “science meeting, just in a pub.” The monthly series, now running in cities all over the world, features a speaker who presents bad science or bad science press, written by people who don’t understand the science they are reporting. The speaker encourages discussion and questions from the audience, thus informing, educating, and entertaining scientists and the general public alike. Curiously enough, no fewer than six Skeptic Speakers are now or have been sued for libel! Half of those law suits were brought about by chiropractors, who have endured particular attention from pseudoscience debunkers.

Sid (not one of the sued) is not often found by the mike – he is usually the host of the London events. On Monday, on the top floor of Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square, he took a crack at presenting. He gave multiple examples of pseudoscience and general quackery in England, along with the steps taken to knock the perpetrator off their unfounded soapbox. My favorite example was that of a nutritionist with a fake diploma, recommending people eat a ton of spinach because the chloroplasts, plant organelles responsible for generating energy and converting carbon dioxide to oxygen in response to light, in the spinach will help oxygenate one’s system. Besides the obvious problem that chloroplasts will likely be digested in one’s stomach, as I mentioned in a previous post, Sid pointed out that unless one shines a very powerful light into one’s, ahem, orifices, no light will reach the ingested chloroplasts to drive oxygen production. Seems obvious in hindsight, doesn’t it…

The crowd, made up predominantly of non-scientists (I think) was very enthusiastic and engaged. In the course of Sid’s talk, the issue of personal genetics came up and elicited tons of questions from the attendees. Questions ranging from the societal implications of personal genome sequencing to its accuracy in predicting disorders were lobbed at Sid, who handled them all with composure and dexterity, of course. This highlighted for me yet again just how much of a big topic genome sequencing has become and how it will likely affect all of us at some point in the not so different future.

If you get the chance, check out the Boston Skeptics in the Pub monthly meetings. There’s beer, there’s science, there’s discussion. It doesn’t get much better than that.