Cafe Sci Orlando announcements for 2008-08

[Chad MILLER]

Contents:

• Introduction
  
• August 6 meeting
• Topic & speaker *
  
• Directions *
  
• Help us thrive
• Perseid meteor shower, August 12 *
  

Asterisked = updated/new since last month.



Café Scientifique is a worldwide grassroots effort to raise science literacy by bringing science out of the lab and into the pub.  It started in England about ten years ago, modeled after the French Café Philosophique, and has since spread to several dozen cities.  Meetings are free to attend, and we love questions.

A typical meeting runs about an hour.  A scientific expert presents some topic for about 20 to 30 minutes, we have a short break to cogitate and order refreshments, and then we ask questions, discuss, and generally have a good time.


August café:  Evolutionary Antecedents of Obesity

For the month of August, we have a cafe meeting on Wednesday, August 6th, at 7pm. 

Evolutionary medicine provides insights into why we are experiencing a global pandemic of obesity, and what we might do about it.

Our speaker will be Dr Leslie Sue Lieberman, a Professor of Anthropology and the founding Director of the Women's Research Center at UCF. She is a biomedical anthropologist with research specializations in type-2 diabetes, nutrition, and obesity. She has co-authored or edited 11 books, and published over 70 journal articles and book chapters. Her research has been supported by NIH, NSF, HRSA, NIMH, and others. She is a member and past-president of the Florida Academy of Sciences.

Our cafe is held at Stardust Video and Coffee, which is in the area north of Colonial (SR50) and east of Mills Ave (17/92), but south of Winter Park.

• From Mills, drive east on Virginia Dr, past Leu Gardens, following the curves -- Virginia, Forest, Corrine.  At a the traffic light for Winter Park Road, turn left/north.
  
• From Colonial, drive north on Bennett Road, toward Baldwin Park.  At the traffic light for Corrine Dr, turn left/west and at the traffic light for Winter Park Road, turn right/north.

From that intersection, Stardust is immediately on the left.  1842 E Winter Park Rd, Orlando, FL.   (407) 623-3393   Beware that some GPS maps send you too far north, to W Winter Park Rd.  Stardust is only 50 feet from Corrine Rd.  The parking lot may be crowded, so consider parking on Marble Ave, which is next to the parking lot .

You may see tables reading "Reserved for Café Scientifique", and that means it's for you and me, not for some other special sub-group.  C-S doesn't have an exclusive monopoly on the venue, and the signs help notify patrons of what we expect to do, not keep spaces for notional V.I.P.s.


Help us grow and thrive!

We need you to help us keep a healthy number of people attending and stoking our dialectic fires.  You can help us in two ways in the next week:  Print out a PDF flier and post it so that others can see it.  Or, tell others about us.  It may be easiest to point them to Cafe Sci Orlando's web site, cafesciorl.com .

Also, Chad loves folksonomies, and recommends using the tag "cafesciorl" to refer to this Café Scientifique.  It's already in use to pull photos from Flickr on the cafe web site.  Take a look at our web site to see it in action.  Use that tag on your own on the 'Net when referring to us.


Perseids

The morning of August 12 is the most active part of the Perseid meteor shower.  After 2am, when the moon sets, there should be plenty to see, especially if you're not blinded by city-light pollution.  Get out and enjoy them.  (Remember mosquito repellent!)