Conscious of spring’s glorious birth today, David Helfand, resident nutty professor of Astronomy, posed a curious question at the beginning of his Beyond the Solar System class: “Would you rather hear my prepared lecture or take a walk?” One hundred sorrowful humanities majors awoke, and Helfand led them on an impromptu adventure in Riverside Park to show “how a scientist looks at the world.” Bwog is still unsure of that, but we did gain other wisdom while tripping over fallen tree branches:

-The Hudson River isn’t actually a river… it’s a fjord! Hot!

-Move to northern Alberta (it’s a Canadian province!) in anticipation of huge shifts in the Global Climate! “It’s going to be really balmy.”

–The Day After Tomorrow’s “time scale is wrong by a factor of 1000.”

-Don’t eat eels out of the Hudson! They’re full of PCBs!

-300 million years ago, it was a 45 minute walk from here to Africa!