Review:

Our bodies follow the rhythm of Mother Nature; they grow, expand, collect & retreat, as the four seasons dictate. So should we schedule the tuning of our bodies in concert with the four seasons. This concept could be a worthwhile practice to take home.

Dr. Hao Liu, O.M.D., was introduced as the 8th generation practitioner of Chinese medicine since his ancestor served the emperors of Ching Dynasty. At age 5, he was able to subscribe Chinese herbs to cure his grandmother’s mild illness. According to Shao-ying Chen, Hao’s announcer, he fixed a yoga practitioner’s spinal alignment problem with few sessions of acupuncture treatment, instead of the lengthy, painful, and time consuming process a standard physical therapy would require.

Using a live demonstration, Hao showed the basic process a Chinese medicine doctor uses to inspect and diagnose his patient: by observing the appearance of the physical, asking the right questions, and feeling the pulse. Hao explained that some basic daily habit adjustments, such as nutritional intake or sleeping schedule, could drastically improve one’s health. Weld, one of Café’s all time faithful attendees, recommended a book about Chinese medicine: The Web that Has no Weaver, by Ted Kaptchuk

Robert Porter introducing Hao Liu, September 27th, 2007

Hao Liu reading the health condition of a Cafe attendee, September 27th, 2007

Weld sharing the book info. of "The Web That Has No Weaver", September 27th, 2007

Preview:

This week, 27 September, will bring us Dr. Hao Liu to discuss the different concepts of science and medicine in the East and the West. We are all aware of the recent explosion in understanding of the body and disease that has resulted in the application of science, molecular biology in particular, to attempts to bring about a new age of health to us, if only we did not insist upon killing ourselves with hideous dietary obsessions. Nevertheless, we forget that a very sophisticated approach to healing has existed in Asia for many centuries before western science was hatched.

Chinese medicine employs concepts unfamiliar to western science. In California, especially some of these Asian concepts are becoming as familiar as "the little purple pill" of in-your-face and down-your-throat drug pushing on television. Yin-Yang is a concept of a sort of dynamic symmetry of opposite but necessary elements that pervade Asian medicine. Each requires the other in this dance of hot-cold, up-down, male-female that is a part of all life. Another system unlike any in our science is the five elementals: fire, wood, earth, water and metal, reminiscent of the old Greek fire-water-air-earth paradigm. In addition, of course there is Qi, that basic life force that surges through living things, a little like elan vital of earlier times in science or the Greek fifth elemental, the quintessential. Dr. Hao Liu will be able to explain the similarities and differences of these systems that attempt to answer that age-old and profound philosophical question, "Doctor, can't you make it better?"

On September 20, Peter LaVeque gave a fascinating talk to the Science Buzz Cafe crowd about the birds of Sonoma County. He told fascinating and intimate details about the creatures that seem almost unbelievable to those of us who are not so familiar with the private lives of the birds.

Peter said his fascination began while watching the water birds around his childhood home in Vallejo. After teaching for a full career, he seems to have slipped into another wherein he can indulge his whims as an ornithologist. His stories about birds that were perched on the edge of extinction but came back with the help of humans, the very species who had threatened them in the first place, included California Condors and pelicans.

However, perhaps the bird that got the most attention in the Cafe society was the Vaux Swift. Swift indeed, for this little bird, relative of the hummingbird and weighing a fraction of an ounce, flies at 100 miles per hour for 900 miles at a stretch in migration. Peter estimates 6000 of them are currently occupying a chimney in Healdsburg. Since they subsist on insects, we owe them a debt of gratitude that we are not neck-deep in bugs.

Peter LaVeque at Science Buzz Cafe on September 20th, 2007

Friday the 13th fell on a Thursday this month as Roger House dispatched the monster subject of infinity in a fashion that Harry Potter would have envied. Many people have avoided mathematics in their previous lives and therefore had not had the pleasure of such mind melding or mild melting thought processes as different "sizes" of infinity. Many such folk came away from Roger's disquisition feeling proud of themselves for having appreciated the aroma, nay, even the bouquet of mathematics, even if they did not fully taste the body, the sugars and tannins of the topic. Many were surprised that such thought has been given to the idea of infinity that whole bodies of technique and terminology have been developed.

Roger began by considering the problem of ordinary counting and thereby introduced the counting numbers, or natural numbers, and quickly convinced everyone that these critters march on and on forever, i.e., to infinity, beyond counting. He went on from there to discuss the rational numbers, formed from ratios, and they went to infinity. Then came the irrational numbers. These numbers cannot be formed from any ratio, the very essence of madness! Well, OK, you just had to be there. However, several in his audience said they did not grasp all the details but now have an appreciation of why mathematicians are the way they are. It has been said that the development of mathematics is like the development of enology. In the beginning there was just grapes. Nevertheless, after several centuries of being carried away, mathematicians and winemakers have developed a product that some cannot live without and some are glad it is there. Way over there.

Roger House at Science Buzz Cafe on September 13, 2007