You never come when I invite you, anyway, but it was still very enlightening. We branched out a bit from nothing but science this time, and Michael Eble, an artist, talked about his connection to Louisiana and recent work on the disappearance of wetlands, in an exhibit titled Endangered Lands. We got to hear* about erosion and the natural and man-made forces that are destroying the Louisiana coastline at a prodigious rate, with Michael’s efforts to capture it in a series of abstract paintings.
*We also got to hear one extraordinarily rude couple’s conversation about their finances — they sat themselves down in the middle of the coffeeshop and ignored our speaker and talked at a volume rivaling his about their distracting pedestrian affairs. It was a remarkable lack of courtesy, and it’s unfortunate that people that obnoxious are always completely oblivious, and don’t feel a scrap of shame.
And thus its ability to protect New Orleans from hurricanes.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Reminds me of the time my wife and I went out to lunch at a nice restaurant and found ourselves across the aisle from a table full of divorce lawyers joking about their clients’ marital difficulties at a volume easily audible to everyone in the room.
New Orleans has its problems, but there are a lot of petrochemical facilities all along the Louisiana coast centered around Lake Charles. A lot of things can go wrong there with disastrous ecological consequences during a hurricane.
Cafe Scientifiques are great!
When they work out, that is (the very first one held here featured one very drunk man)…
We are about to have our third in Tampere, Finland, with Dr. Bambos Kyriacou talking about genes and biorythms. Can’t wait!
Maybe PZ you could come visit us some day?
Was there any place in the cafe they could have gone?
I just wonder – why thinks nobody of countering impoliteness with a harsh: fuck off, you idiots?
It is not always correct to be nice. People have to earn the right to be treated nicely.
It’s too bad nobody at the meeting had an intolerable lack of patience, short-temper, and a penchant for telling ignorant morons to take it somewhere else. Sometimes, people are so oblivious to their inane conversational topics that someone must speak up and tell them to stuff it. Who wants to listen to a conversation on persistent external hemorrhoids when you’re engaged in something fundamentally more interesting? By the way, is it me, or does Starbucks have a significant proportion of oblivious idiots ranting about personal topics that barely even belong in their physician’s office.
(from the link)
“Reminds me of the time my wife and I went out to lunch at a nice restaurant and found ourselves across the aisle from a table full of divorce lawyers joking about their clients’ marital difficulties at a volume easily audible to everyone in the room.”
Maybe they thought they were advertising.
PZ,
You never give me enough time to fly out to meet you and buy you beer!!! Sorry to hear about the rude couple. I can stare those kind of people down like the best of them.
Glad you’re coming to Toronto for once. I’m really looking forward to it.
And no-one said anything? You are all much too polite :-)
We get our speakers to provide a handout in advance (no more than 2 A4 pages, & it goes on our website too http://www.sci.waikato.ac.nz/news/Lectures/CafeScientifique.shtml – we find quite a few school teachers use them as classroom resources). Then we go round & hand them out before the meeting starts, & make sure new people know that the Cafe is on & that they’re welcome to join us if they hadn’t actually come for that purpose. So far, the response has been either to join the Cafe crowd or finish their drink & move on to the next pub :-) I think we did have one guy who persisted in being noisy & off-topic; the regulars were very quick to sort things out.
That must have been a Morris Style Cafe Scientifique. In Minneapolis we have Shanai. Shanai would have put an end to that.
There is a new science cafe starting in Fargo this week. The first meeting will be on Thursday evening.
College of Science and Mathematics announces Science Cafe
A first ever Science Cafe will be held on Thursday, October 30th, 7:00 – 8:30 p.m. in the Stokers Lounge located in the lower level of the Hotel Donaldson, downtown Fargo. Dr. Benton Duncan, Professor of Mathematics, will host the discussion, entitled “North Dakotans Matter More than Californians: Your Power and the Electoral College.” The Science Cafe is sponsored by the College of Science and Mathematics and the Hotel Donaldson, and attendees must be 21 or older.
Abstract:
Is it fair that California has 55 electoral votes and North Dakota has 3.
We will examine a mathematical measure of voting power which suggests that
it isn’t fair–to Californians. We will also discuss the practical
aspects of this measure of voting power.
anyone from the philly area that would be interested in starting up a cafe scientifique? we are moving to the area around xmas time, and from the site it didn’t look like there was one established in the area.
that venue should have been “vetted” a little more thoroughly?
Off topic, but I feel as many people as possible need to know about this nutcase who is slandering various people via his blogs, and instantly reminded me of one of PZ Myers’ enemies.
http://circleh.wordpress.com/2008/10/27/mark-bellinghaus-a-case-of-insanity/
This Mark Bellinghaus sounds a LOT like this dude:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/plonk.php
David Mabus
INSANITY
Automatically Junked
Deeply deranged, disturbed individual who believes James Randi has cheated him out of a million dollars, and who vents by spamming websites and email with his angry tirades. Certifiable. Needs immediate mental health care. His real name is Dennis Markuze, and he lives in Montreal, Canada.
Mine is tomorrow (Wednesday) – subject is “Why people believe in pseudoscientific and paranormal claims” presented by Terrance Hines, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Pace University, Adjunct Professor of Neurology, New York Medical College, and author of “Pseudoscience and the Paranormal”
Frankly, I am excited and plan to get there early.
JC
An interesting insight regarding Dr. Meyers! Personally, I would not have hesitated to approach the couple and asked them to at least tone it down. My manners are not as refined as are PZ’s.
We had a Cafe Sci going here in Champaign-Urbana a couple of years ago, then it stopped because the hosting coffee shop closed. Now I am all het up to start a search to find another venue…
Off Topic
National Poll on pbs.org:
http://www.pbs.org/cgi-registry/poll/poll.pl
“Do you think Sarah Palin is qualified to serve as Vice President of the United States?”
Yes 50%
No 48%
Not Sure 0%(should be 2%, weird)
I think Minnesotans expect others to be “Minnesota nice”. If they aren’t, others will often just ignore them. They don’t try to reinforce bad behavior by giving the rude person attention.
Could be. Markuze uses many aliases and changes them from minute to minute. He has spammed this blog before with his incoherent ramblings.
And yeah he is really crazy.
Well, neener neener, Joe and I just got back from a nice read-and-sign plus homegirl chat with Lauri Lebo (The Devil in Dover) in downtown Berkeley. I mentioned the famous beercan collection but I was too nice to ask her to show us her tat, so maybe we’re even.
I’m thinking the thing to do with loud people in cafes, as with loud cellphoneys, is to cheerfully join the conversation. Goodness, think of all the free advice the lot of you could’ve given them. Don’t get mad; get weird!
In Atlanta they are held at a local bar, in a separate area. It’s call Science Tavern, rather than Cafe (ummm, beer), and has been going since this summer.
For those in the Atlanta area, here’s the link:
http://www.meetup.com/AtlantaScienceTavern/
Meeting are typically the last Sat of the month, so the major risk of distraction is when the crowd in adjacent rooms roar when the home team scores.
Dadgum atheists, always coming to town when I’m out….
Sorry I missed you in Atlanta, storied land of my birth. Next time you’re in town I promise a tour of the south’s finest godless hangouts.
Hope you’re having a blast in Toronto. Might relocate up that way in a year or two for school, as it were.
Just me, but I would have walked over to their table and told them to shut the fuck up. If they don’t, you take a salt shaker off another table, unscrew the top and dump the salt in one of their drinks.
Which will always start a fight, and then the fun starts.
Oh, sorry. My strumpet was showing. *wink*
Suspect that Theodore Roosevelt would have a more constructive attitude about wetlands, once he was up to speed, but by todays standards, he would be considered a liberal. As for the oblivious, a loud “Great Zarquon, next they’ll be talking about vaginal dryness and erectile dysfunction!” should suffice.
Re: rude people. There’s a UK journalist, Euan Ferguson, who refers to people like that as ‘ox people’ – those who are completely oblivious to others/situations etc, that I think is a great description.
Its so hilarious to read about PZ complaining about someone being rude!
Bahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ah, the troll that fears responding on the thread addressed to it shows up again.
Not that what it writes is at all believable, but I draw some amusement from the effort at that feeble onomatopoeic effort.
Julie W,
you are a dishonest,torn,insecure person.Please stop trying to be funny,or original,you are not relevant,not interesting,not intellectually capable.
How sad your life must be.
That’s not the real Julie Westhues. She didn’t write ‘LOL’ even once; this is obviously someone with greater-than-fourth-grade written comprehension skills.
Though this couple were obnoxious, when you hold a meet in an open public space rather than renting it completely you take your chances. I suspect a lot of patrons there for coffee or free Internet were put out by the overbearing science nerds.
Yes LOL, Julie LOL, where are the LOLs LOL?
(cue Julie LOLing at her own outrageously hilarious online witticisms, LOL, oh my sides they are splitting LOL).
Julie LOL, does it LOL bother you LOL that much that people who LOL can run LOL rings around you mentally LOL exist? LOL.
ROFLMAO.
LOL.
Surely, if your group had booked the space, you could have politely asked the couple to leave.
Without further information, it’s tough to know whether PZ or steve8282 is right about the rudeness situation.
First, was the venue informed in advance of the gathering, or did the bunch of you just show up? Was there any kind of announcement to other customers about what was going on (such as a poster at the door)? Does the venue have a separate area used for such meetings, and if so, was there space available outside that area that the interfering people could have used?
If the event was scheduled in advance with the knowledge and agreement of the management, and if reasonable measures were undertaken to inform other patrons and/or provide seating away from the meeting, then PZ’s complaint about rudeness is justified. If not, I’d say there were extenuating circumstances (at least).
I agree. It depends whether PZ and co. booked the space or not.
Otherwise, the ‘rude’ people were perfectly within their rights to have their conversation, and PZ and co. were the ones being rude by presuming the whole cafe was as interested in their talk as they were!
When I encounter obnoxious people like that, I just turn and face them directly, and watch them. If asked what I’m doing, I say they’re obviously far more interesting than the movie/show/speaker I came to see, and I’m just trying to figure out why. In the case of your finance couple, I’d likely have pulled a chair up to their table and offered two cents on their finances as well.
Usually makes the point.
If you’re just dropping in to a public cafe, then your meeting is intruding on their conversational space just as much as they are intruding on your meeting. They might be talking loudly to drown you out. The only thing to do is drop your voices and look conspiratorial.
It may have been rude for those people, but it is a public space. The Denver Cafe Sci is held in a private room at the Wynkoop (restaurant/bar), so we don’t have to worry too much about ambient noise.
“*We also got to hear one extraordinarily rude couple’s conversation about their finances ”
I had a similar experience in Paris (where most of the rudeness I encountered was from other Americans). On the bus from the airport a middle-aged couple was seated in front of my girlfriend of the time and I and they spent most of the trip loudly going over their restaurant bill so that we would all know how much they had spent.
The coup de grace was when I noticed a seat opening up in the front and pointed it out to my girlfriend. We were both quite cramped and could use the leg room (I am 6’3 and she is 6’5 so we really were having some leg origami going on). The woman turned around and looked at us with an evil smile and then hurried up to grab the recently vacated front seat. What’s more– they were no more than average height.
“We also got to hear one extraordinarily rude couple’s conversation about their finances ”
I had a similar experience in Paris (where most of the rudeness I encountered was from other Americans). On the bus from the airport a middle-aged couple was seated in front of my girlfriend of the time and I and they spent most of the trip loudly going over their restaurant bill so that we would all know how much they had spent.
The coup de grace was when I noticed a seat opening up in the front and pointed it out to my girlfriend. We were both quite cramped and could use the leg room (I am 6’3 and she is 6’5 so we really were having some leg origami going on). The woman turned around and looked at us with an evil smile and then hurried up to grab the recently vacated front seat. What’s more– they were no more than average height.
Nobody loudly hollered “SHADDAP!”?
That often works. It’s almost as rude as they are, you often get dirty looks, but it often works.
I don’t buy the arguments here that they were somehow within their “rights” in a public place, regardless of whether it was booked.
If there hadn’t been a presentation by a speaker, and one just sat down at a table to enjoy a bite to eat and had to listen to that gab, it would have been just as discourteous.
Reminds me of a cross-country train trip in which I nearly went bananas having to listen to people gab on their cellphones. “Guess where I am NOW!” The worst was the incessant chorus of repeated “HELLO??? HELLO???…ARE YOU THERE?? HELL-OO-OH…” whenever we passed through cell signal-shadow territory in the Rockies. Like 10 of them in a single car. It was unbearable.
Some people just think they own the space they’ve invaded to do with as they choose.
I’m from Louisiana, and after every Christmas, you have the ability to put your tree on the curb and have it picked up and sent down to the Gulf to help preserve the wetlands. Almost everyone does it (it’s pretty easy to do–just as easy as throwing it away!). Last year I visited the Pacific Northwest shortly after Christmas and was confused to see people grinding their trees down for mulch. It didn’t occur to me that anyone, anywhere wouldn’t donate their tree, but when I realized I was ~2,000 miles away from the gulf coast it made more sense.
I missed nothing. I never miss a thing.