Café Scientifique Lives!

The inaugural Café Scientifique Syracuse took place last night and, in my opinion, was a rip-roaring success. I've gone on at length before about what this event was all about, and so won't repeat it here. All I want to do is give an update. We had just over thirty people attend, a very nice talk from my biology colleague Scott Erdman on the Human Genome Project, and some wonderful sushi and egg roll appetizers provided by John Sansone and his great staff at Ambrosia. Beer, wine, coffee, soda, mojitos and margaritas flowed as liberally as people desired, and may have contributed to the long and lively discussion session that followed. It was great to have a diverse collection of people discussing science. There were plenty of "This is probably a stupid question, but ...?" questions, and I learned most from the answers to them, which is the way it's supposed to be. The whole event lasted about two hours, after which the organizers and speakers stayed around for a light dinner. Now that the first event has gone so well, we can turn our attention to wider advertising and tweaking the format, and we started that process already over dinner last night. I'll report again after our second meeting, on Tuesday September 6th, same time, same place. (Thanks to PZ Myers at Pharyngula for his supportive comments. We have at least one person attending because they saw his post mentioning our Café Scientifique.)