By Keith Michael Standing at the railing in Hudson River Park, binoculars poised, I’m scanning the rocks of the recently demolished Sanitation Pier for the umpteenth time. I’m willing a Spotted Sandpiper to appear doing its tail-bobbing rumba walk picking through the seaweed wrack line, and for the umpteenth time: nada. I’ve seen Spotted Sandpipers
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Quoth the Raven: Homage to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven
By Keith Michael In the dark, alarm clocks ring-a-ling, Millie’s tags upon her jingling, Interrupt my pulling clothes on, as she’s likely thinking, sore, “Hey, it’s way too early morning. You just woke me without warning. I dreamt marrow bones were warming, asked for, yapping, something more. Let me go back happ’ly napping, oh, so
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Out and About
By Keith Michael June, July, and August are when my exhausted academic schedules get crammed into binders for the summer and I get out! Yes, I love the West Village—my morning, afternoon, and evening walks with Millie circumnavigating her corgi-friendly blocks continue to delight me with their sights. But, give me a map to unfold
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Are We Alone? Ruminations about Extraterrestrial Life (Part Two)
By Josef Eisinger© In Part One of this article, I posed the question: Is our story of life on Earth unique or did life also develop elsewhere? I also discussed some of the observations and laws of physics that affect the likelihood of life emerging and evolving on another planet. In this segment, I explore
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Nest. Egg.
By Keith Michael This little wren went to market, This little wren stayed home, This little wren had, well, caterpillars, This little wren had none. And this little wren went, “Wee wee wee” all the way back to the nest. —Anonymous Let’s face it: Birds are baffling. They have feathers. They can fly. They either
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One Guy’s Story and a National Epidemic
By M. Zakir Sabry, MD “There was always a moment of inertia.” That was the best way that Guy could explain his every movement prior to having weight-loss surgery. As he so eloquently put it, “Every time I moved, there was a pause of a second or two and, then my large hanging skin and
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Are We Alone? Ruminations About Extraterrestrial Life (Part One)
By Josef Eisinger In these troubled times, it is enlightening and consoling to ponder our place in the larger scheme of things. We are today privileged to have gained a realistic perspective of our place in the universe thanks to the great progress scientists have made in the past century. Their observations of the universe
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What’s In a Name?
By Keith Michael “My name is Alice, but—” “It’s a stupid name enough!” Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. “What does it mean?” “Must a name mean something?” Alice asked doubtfully. —Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll “Milton! Sitting down to scratch your head in the middle of the crosswalk is not a good idea!” Countdown: Ten,
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Meet the Fishes
The River Project’s annual open house events invite the community to meet the fishes, crabs, and other neighborhood creatures at our Wetlab on Pier 40 on Tuesday, May 23rd from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Meet the Fishes welcomes people to experience our unique flow-through aquarium system that contains Hudson River water from under the
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Inside Out
By Keith Michael With a glass of wine in my hand and Millie’s corgi nose slumbering across my foot, the late afternoon sun draws shadows down the walls. Well, that’s not quite accurate: The glass of wine sits beguilingly blocking my monitor as I type, and Millie is flattened far across the floor in her
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Love is in the Air
By Keith Michael Kek kek kek kek kek drops like aural sleet from somewhere above the rooflines. Dragging me to the curb, Millie scavenges for an augmentation to her (obviously, according to her) inadequate continental breakfast fare. Corgi foraging leads her nose into the deepest footprints in the single leftover bank of February snow on
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Birds of a Feather…
Dear George, Liza, Andreea, and Darielle: I just picked up a (slightly damp) copy of WestView, and opened it to find—SHAZAM!—a gorgeous two-page layout of my Bird of the Year article!! Thank you so much for such an honored place in WestView. Thanks for the photo selection, evocative cropping, and beautiful arrangement. I am amazed.
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Owl Fever
By Keith Michael I have to write this quickly while Millie is out with her dog walker. Yes, Millie is unfaithful to me daily, and goes out on the town with her friends. Whether she has converted her canine companions to bird enthusiasts, I don’t know. She’s mum about that. The reason I have to
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Bird of the Year 2016
By Keith Michael We’re here amidst the hustle and bustle as finishing touches are added to the grandstand for the announcement of The 11th Annual Millies: the coveted Bird of the Year Awards! For those of you only listening in from your earbuds, I’m standing with Millie, the awards’ namesake, at the confounding intersection of
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The Origin of Death Revisited Following the 2016 Election
By Mark M. Green Nearly eight years ago, I wrote a column about the origin of death. An edited version of this column appears below. Perhaps publishing on this subject now relates to some of us feeling as though we are at the origin of something a bit like death. This relates to politics, not
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Crash Course
By Keith Michael It’s the morning circling of pigeons. Millie is dilly-dallying around the corner onto West 11th Street, one reluctant corgi step at a time. Is the pigeons’ morning circling timed to our walk, or is our walk timed to the circling of the pigeons? Either way, it’s a daily fall spectacle. The “spectacle”
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Visit the Sea at Our Door
By Cathy Drew For three decades, The River Project has operated an active marine science field station in Hudson River Park, first at Pier 26, and, presently, in temporary quarters on the south walkway of Pier 40 at Houston Street. The Project was founded in 1986 by myself, the current Executive Director, and a longtime
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Science from Away: A Short Science Story about Viruses and Cancer
By Mark M. Green (sciencefromaway.com) Cancer patients in the 1800s were observed, too often to be chance, to be relieved of their cancerous tumors when they were ill with respiratory problems. When viruses were discovered later in that century, it was hypothesized that viral particles were responsible for the effect on the cancerous tumors. The
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Bird’s Eye View
By Keith Michael Millie is sitting this one out (or sleeping it off—dreaming of hallways without vacuum cleaners or exterminators, streets without fluttering plastic bags, and curbs with slices of pizza lined up end to end around the block waiting to be consumed, i.e., corgi heaven). It’s an October Sunday morning under a cloudier sky
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Science from Away: Political Science Applied to Terrorism
By Mark M. Green (sciencefromaway.com) Does political science deserve to be called a science? When I was in high school and later in college in the 1950s, there was a required course we called “polysci” and the science engineering types thought it was great because we didn’t have to memorize a lot of facts or
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A Flicker Flew In
By Keith Michael This morning, Millie and I are out for her appraisal-of-the-neighborhood amble around the block. In her corgi-ish way, I imagine Millie reveling in the crisp October sunrise painting the cobblestones. Looking up, a Flicker flies into the honey locust tree at the end of the block. Barely having seen it, I knew
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Epidemiology— We are the Canary
By Mark Green (sceincefromaway.com) Hoosick Falls is a lovely town in upstate New York near the Vermont border and famous as the home of a remarkable painter: Grandma Moses. Recently, it became famous again, for the discovery that a chemical associated with the production of non-stick cookware, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), is at a dangerously high
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Are You Mocking Me?
By Keith Michael “Are corgis naturally fat?” Millie and I squint into the late-afternoon September sun at our inquisitor—nonplussed. Well, Millie is actually sitting and looking up with a smile as though the question was: “Would you like a treat?” There you have it. Corgis seem to inspire repartee on the street, and, quite frankly,
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Defining Transgender
I’m an avid reader of WestView News. I have learned and absorbed a lot from the perspective of the contributing writers over the years. And as a baby resident of the West Village—since 2003 living at WVH, which presents its own unique set of challenges that threaten renters and residents here especially right now—I appreciate
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Night Shift
By Keith Michael The stratospheric twittering of Chimney Swifts scribbles through the air, several octaves above the clicks, whirrs, and drones of summer air conditioners working full throttle. Sticking out like porcupine quills, tufts of Millie’s fur occasionally waft off, tumble-weeding behind her down the sidewalk—she is in full summer corgi-shedding mode. And she HATES
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Science From Away: What are scientists doing?
By Mark M. Green (sciencefromaway.com) There are scientific journals and there are scientific journals. The latter are really only two, Science and Nature that are widely read; publishing in such a journal gives the scientist enormous prestige among his or her fellows, which can translate to coveted benefits. This happened to me once in my
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The Physics of Everyday Things
By Trush Majmudar Physics and mathematics have been used successfully to describe the world around us. When we think of physics, we usually think either very big, like stars and galaxies, or very small, like atoms and molecules. But our everyday experience typically is of things that are somewhere in-between in scale; think of cereal,
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Science from Away: Some Interesting Stuff
By Mark M Green (sciencefromaway.com) The Kepler Space Telescope has added a new planet with life supporting temperatures to the two thousand three hundred and twenty-five planets already known. The new one is 2.4 times the size of earth and only 600 light years away from earth. Not likely a neighbor we’ll be in touch
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Performance Treadmill (Part Two)
By Christina Winholt Raccuia It takes courage to face our fears and ourselves. But you have to notice what you are telling yourself that drives you to the default of hiding. Many of us have painful memories that have caused us to want to numb out or withdraw. Maybe someone told you that you were
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The Common Touch
By Keith Michael If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch… From If, Rudyard Kipling Probably my favorite story to tell about birds in New York (and there are so many to choose from) is about a 19th century Bronx pharmacist, Eugene Schieffelin, then chairman
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Science from Away: Transgender, the Facts
By Mark M. Green (sciencefromaway.com) Very few of us are free from some degree of discomfort in the presence of those who occupy the world in a manner different from ourselves. It’s not unreasonable to see that understanding the “other” is a path to greater acceptance and alleviation of that discomfort. Lately there has
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Me, Me, Me
By Keith Michael “The song is called ‘Ways and Means’ but that’s only what it’s called, you know!” “Well, what is the song, then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered. “I was coming to that,” the Knight said. —Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll “Do, Re, ME ME ME, Fa, So, La,
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Science from Away: Carbon—The Source of Climate Change
By Mark M Green (sciencefromaway.com) Carbon is a great element. It loves to bond with itself leading to all that fat around our midsections. Carbon also bonds with nitrogen and oxygen giving us, for just three examples of many, our skin, and hair, and muscles, and those incalculably useful enzymes that catalyze all the chemical
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Fracking at Your Neighborhood Nuclear Power Plant
By Reverend Donna Schaper There are 30 million people near enough to the Indian Point Power Plant to be affected by any difficulty or disaster there. But a disaster is now in the making. According to Mina Hamilton, journalist and expert on energy policy, the plan is for natural gas giant, Spectra Energy, to construct
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Performance Treadmill (Part One)
By Christina Winholt Raccuia Every day, we are bombarded with images, which send a clear message that “Thin is in,” and that looks matter. With such emphasis placed on appearance in our culture, both men and women in the U.S. have be-come obsessed with their body image and perfection. Body image refers to a person’s
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Stress! Tools to Help
By Ron Elve Some of us are anxious and unhappy when confronted with fairly trivial situations such as road rage, but others are quite calm even when facing truly serious circumstances such as terminal cancer. Focusing on your reaction to a stressful situation is one tool that can help you keep your calm. No matter
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Science from Away: Recently Read Science
By Mark M. Green (sciencefromaway.com) I have two children who are millennials, born between 1980 and 2000. One is a vegetarian and the other a vegan, attitudes toward eating that I considered strange until I read that the food-consulting-firm Mintel informs us that 13% of millennials ascribe to these eating categories and are getting their
