It's great to see this idea spreading: Mark Trodden is organizing a Cafe Scientifique. In case you hadn't heard of it before, the Cafe Scientifique is a program of scientific outreach in which scientist get together over food, coffee, or beer to give short, informal presentations to the general community. It's great fun, and the Twin Cities version has been running very successfully for a year.

We started organizing ours last spring—but Mark is going to beat us to actually doing a presentation, with the first one in Syracuse on 2 August. We're scheduled to launch here in Morris on 27 September. We're a little slower because 1) Morris, Minnesota is really dead in the summer months, and 2) we're going to have the full force of the University of Minnesota PR machine turned to our advantage. There are going to be press releases and articles in the Star Tribune and in many regional newspapers touting this thing, so we'd darn well better do a good job.

They're starting to pop up all over the place, a sign that scientists are becoming more conscious that public awareness is a good thing to have on our side. I'll have much more to say about organizing this later in September.