Andrew R Gross

I'm very disappointed with Nancy Pelosi's response to the government shutdown. Obviously, I'm far more than disappointed with Donald Trump's decision to shut the government down, and I don't really like Chuck Schumer's response, either.  But I highlight Pelosi because she's the only one of these three with some influence and who isn't the person who is shutting down the government. I'm disappointed because Nancy Pelosi is doing exactly what anyone would expect her to do, which is doing nothing and letting a disaster unfold that will damage her opposition's political standing.  The problem is that this strategy makes no consideration whatsoever for thousands of people who are falling into permanent economic hardship due to this shutdown. The media has reported, it seems, thousands of times about the visitors to Joshua Tree who now have to endure visiting a national park without the reassuring knowledge that a professional park ranger is keep...

One of these dogs is a mutt, and the other is a purebreed. One is a model of health, and the other is ... a purebreed. If you aren't aware, the process of dog breeding is controversial.  On one hand, most of us love the products of breeding: the lovable Golden Retriever, the fearsome German Shepard, the whimsical Dachshund.  Unfortunately, these breeds can only exist so long as we continue to mate two dogs of the same breed to make a litter of new breed members, and the unpleasant truth is that we know that in doing so we're promoting birth defects.  It's long past time we thought about how to improve this practice. Dog breeds are defined by kennel clubs like the American Kennel Club (AKC) and the Westminster Kennel Club (WKC).  These clubs hold shows where judges assess which dog looks most like the kind of dog it is supposed to be, and these winners go on to sire puppies who will carry forward the noble blood line of the breed.  The concept makes sim...

I have a new prediction. I think that Kim will agree to fully denuclearize in exchange for America's complete military withdrawal from South Korea. He'll agree to periodic inspections by the UN Atomic Energy Comission in exchange for a complete end to sanctions. He'll add in programs to allow families increased ability to visit one another across borders and favorable trade opportunities between North Korea, South Korea, and China. Trump and Bolton and company will refuse to accept any deal in which the US leaves South Korea.  South Korea, however, will see a deal too good to pass up.  South Korea will tell the US that if the US doesn't agree to the deal, South Korea is going to be forced to publicly break from the US and eject them. The US will come to some compromise, perhaps withdraw all but 5,000 troops over 10 months, while insisting that it was their complete decision to do so.  Even so, Trump and co. will refuse to relax sanctions on North Korea and p...

Last week, the hospital I work at hosted a conference on the role of Virtual Reality in medicine. After strolling through demo booths, here are the top five companies and products that blew me away. Number Five: AppliedVR appliedvr.io/ AppliedVR is a startup that provides VR equipment and support for hospitals to use to manage pain. It’s a simple business, but it makes sense. Virtual Reality is incredibly immersive, which studies have shown can effectively calm patients and distract them from anxiety and even physical pain during procedures like blood draws. Setting up and maintaining equipment and software is something most hospitals are unlikely to be prepared to manage, so AppliedVR encourages them to outsource it. Regardless of AppliedVR’s future, the future of VR to transport patients away from their bodies during medical procedures and to provide mental stimulation to patients confined to a hospital is all but certain to assume a place in hospitals in the future. Numb...

Last week, SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy, a rocket capable of lifting cargo beyond Earth's orbit, to the Moon or Mars.  Along with presumably thousands of other people, I watched the live feed with baited breath.  So I was surprised when I encountered friends online who respectfully questioned why this was really of any consequence.  Sure it's thrilling.  So was the Eagles' Superbowl victory.  But does a billionaire sending a sports car into interplanetary space really have any more significance than a sports victory? I think it does. Although the stated goal is distant, I think that the technologies developed to explore space are usually of the most benefit here on Earth.  Life support equipment in particular is always designed with the goal of making humans healthier and more comfortable while using the least resources.  There isn't anything of that is designed to provide humans with clean water and food on Mars that isn't of use in the un...

Tomorrow is my 31st birthday, and I'm blessed with incredible health.  Which makes this a fitting time to make a statement that I feel needs to be said about my mortality.  I believe that it is most likely that when I die, it will be due to cancer.  And furthermore, I don't consider this a bad thing. I went to a doctor for a general checkup last week, and asked to get my genome screened or sequenced in order to assess what hereditary diseases I'm at elevated risk for.  The doctor told me I was about five years early and that it wasn't an affordable or covered service yet, so I guess I'll just have to wait.  When I mentioned that I was fairly confident I'd die of cancer, she was taken aback.  "Why would you say that?" she asked.  Her tone was respectfully professional but without an effort to hide her disapproval that I would prognosticate my own cause of death.  Did she think I was being disrespectful to people with cancer?  Did she think I...

Sadly, as Glenn Greenwald points out, "...nothing unites people behind the leader more quickly, reflexively or reliably than war."   Unfortunately, most Republicans as well as many Democrats -- including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Nanci Pelosi -- have stated their support of Trump starting a war with a country allied with another nuclear superpower.  According to FiveThirtyEight.com's Perry Bacon, "Most Senators Support Trump's Syria Airstrike" .  He provides a list, stating that only six senators have come out vocally against Trump's strike.  His list is very incomplete, but it's a good place to start.  Here are the leaders who actually learned something from our disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Please lend your support to these individuals and message me we with any I'm missing at andrew@shrad.org. Senators Kirstin Gillibrand - Senator of New York "The chemical attacks by the Assad...

The evidence is clear.  This week, outgoing President Barack Obama published an opinion peice in the journal Science titled, " The irreversible momentum of clean energy ".  The arguments he lays down are quite similar to the ones I made last month on this blog. Mr. President, if you're reading this, I'm flattered, sir.

My brother and I were talking about the fears of automation and it led to him searching for articles arguing against those who were concerned.  Among them he found this one: "Opinions: The robots aren’t threatening your job" [Washington Post].  It offers the general dismissals of a journalist living in Washington DC in 2015. The Great Robot Freakout of 2015 has begun, and it looks a lot like the robot freakouts that came before it.   In a new survey by CNBC, Americans were asked how concerned they were, if at all, that their jobs could be replaced by technology in the next five years. The level of automation angst was astonishing: About 1 in 8 workers indicated was worried about being displaced. Among those earning less than $30,000, it was a whopping 1 in 4.    ...  Then, as now, such premonitions embraced the so-called   Luddite Fallacy : that technological developments would permanently reduce or even eliminate the need for human ...

Recently I've read several articles that excite me regarding climate change. If you know me, you probably know that I have a pet peeve for climate alarmists.  There is a famous scene in Aaron Sorkin's show "The Newsroom" in which a scientist informs the protagonist that the literal apocalypse has occurred, and we are now living in the brief delay between when it happened and when the events foretold in the Book of Revelations unfold.  The concept of the scene is clear: Sorkin is trying to shock his audience with the knowledge that global warming is not something which is coming, it is something which has come.  And that's true.  It's effects have already begun, and by all projections it is too late to shift course before we see catastrophic weather events that may kill thousands.  Which sucks.  But 1.25 million people died in car accidents last year, so lets not confuse what's coming with the literal end of humankind. Panic among those concerned a...

This seems like it might be an opinion that is unpopular with both liberals and conservatives, but I honestly feel really bad for Paul Ryan, and I don't think he's spineless at all. Paul Ryan has been repeatedly called spineless for failing to openly oppose Trump.  I've heard many commentators -- Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee -- point out Ryan's own full-throated denouncements of Trump's behavior as evidence that Ryan clearly hates the candidate he purports to endorse.  They then charge Ryan with cowardice for not standing up to a candidate he knows is completely unqualified. I get the logic here, but I see a different set of calculations behind Ryan's actions.  I think Paul Ryan has continued to endorse Donald Trump for two reasons: 1)  He sincerely believes that upholding party unity is a cardinal virtue. 2)  He isn't willing to sacrifice his career for a symbolic protest. Now, there's certainly plenty of room for di...

Recently headlines have declared that Zika has been confirmed to cause microcephaly.  If you haven't been following, Zika is a viral infection similar to Yellow Fever or Denguy Fever that has broken out in Brazil over the last year.  At the same time, Brazil has witnessed an epidemic of a severe birth defect called microcephaly.  It's alarming both for it's consequence and it's mystery.  Microcephaly is a terrible birth defect in which babies are born with small, malformed brains.  But although it seems likely that the microcephaly epidemic is the result of an outbreak of another virus occurring at the same time, we don't actually know how Zika causes microcephaly or how often microcephaly occurs in women with Zika.  This is a huge question. In order to firmly establish that Zika is actually CAUSING birth defects that are occurring, researchers in Brazil grew neruons in a dish and then infected them with Zika.  When they did, the neurons died. What...

If you're one of my friends then statistically speaking you're already voting for Bernie Sanders.  But if you happen to be an outlier, then I'd like to offer a reason why you really should vote for Bernie Sanders in your state's primary.  It's because his candidacy has a forced attention on to critical issues going on in our country and we all are benefiting more the longer this discussion goes.  I think that even if you don't actually agree with Bernie Sanders, you still might agree that the attention being paid to things like income inequality and the roles that our political parties play in modern politics is long overdue. Right now I'm assuming that if you aren't already voting for Sanders it's because you've considered his strengths and weaknesses against those of Hillary Clinton and you've concluded one or more of the following: either he's too liberal for you or he's too liberal to get elected. Although I disagree, I won...

For those curious where I stand on the 2016 presidential race, I support Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders because of his very vocal acknowledgement of the alarming decrease in upward mobility taking place in America today. There is a reason why Bernie Sanders has been consistently finding overwhelming support from voters 30 and under.  First: younger Americans are much more aware of the shortchanging they're receiving.  Secondly, as with all generations, it is the young who are willing to reject the notion that the way things have been done in the past is the only way that they can be done.  Social security was once an ambitious new idea.  The highway system was once new.  Medicare and Medicaid too.  Also, these are all completely socialist programs which most Americans are extremely fond of. Is Bernie Sanders electable?  Absolutely.  He's already shown himself to be a formidable contender against Hillary Clinton.  Furthermore, with the imp...

Last week I saw a cool gif of the earth from space. It's a time-lapse of one day in incredible resolution.  It was taken by the Himawari-8 satellite on August 5, 2015.   The Earth If you look in the middle you can see a swirl of clouds. I wondered: how special are those clouds?  Are we looking at a big storm? Regular cloud patterns over the Pacific? Did it have a name?  Fortunately, I have a meteorologist friend, Brad Schaaf. Brad lives in Medford, OR, where he works for the National Weather Service traking weather and dealing with crazy harassing phone calls from conspiracy theorists.  Apparently the only people who care about weather and the skies as much as meteorologists are lunatics.  Here is Brad's response. Andrew, I got your message and did a bit of investigating into the storm. You are quite correct that it is quite a remarkable system, and that it is named. (Fun fact: only systems like this are named. The winter storm name...

The other weekend my neighbor Elizabeth invited me to a regional conference held by the Citizen's Climate Lobby (CCL).  I mentioned the CCL in an earlier post.  It's a climate action group which lobbies individual representatives to support a particular strategy for phasing out the production of carbon dioxide (CO2), which has been slowly raising the temperature of our planet over the last two hundred years. The conference really impressed me because it offered an uncommonly realistic strategy for addressing climate change.  If climate change action is something to which you don't pay much attention, you can be forgiven on the grounds that it's a depressing topic with very little new news.  It periodically appears in the news when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases an update on how much CO2 has been released and what effects we expect to occur on what time frame, but other than that it just marches along quietly. Occasionally but rar...

I want to share two things that I think are very cool.  The first is this article about Congressman John Culberson and his passion for extraterrestrial exploration.  The second is a set of tools for picking attractive colors for charts. John Culberson and the Icy Moon I recently read an article in Ars Technica ( "Attempt no landing there? Yeah right—we’re going to Europa" ) that described the state of NASA's mission to the moon Europa.  It said that remarkably, it's being cheered along by the Chairman of the House of Representative's Appropriations Subcommittee, John Culberson.   I shouldn't bother repeating the whole article.  It's worth reading.  The gist is that John Culberson is a Texas Republican fighting to assist -- and even push -- NASA into planning a super-expensive kick-ass science mission to the moon of Jupiter, Europa.  Why?  Because he thinks Europa is just that fucking awesome. I relate.  It's probably all I rel...

I wanted to make a post on two things -- Europa and picking colors that go well together -- but the Europa part got long, so I moved the color thing to a separate post.  This one. This probably won't excite or impress you unless you've found this to be a problem, but I found several tools for picking out optimal sets of colors for making attractive diagrams. I remember seeing the following figure several years ago.  Every day.  Because I printed it out and taped it next to my computer.  The specific bars don't matter so much, to tell the truth, but those citations listed next to each one make up an incredible list of sources that I wouldn't have been able to put together myself otherwise.  I relied on it for checking up on a lot of things when working as a deep-sea marine biologist.  It's from a review from 2012 that remains an outstanding piece of scientific writing.  Dense as hell, but super, super, informative. "FIG. 7. Composition of bacte...