Andrew R Gross

Today, Julie and I ran a marathon.  You can see my pace and the route here .  I'll have some of myself in action later.  For now, enjoy this show to J before the starting gun It was a weird experience.  I had plenty of time (7 hours, 21 minutes, and 3 seconds) to think about it, and I went through several stages before arriving at my current one. The first stage was satisfaction/confidence.  This was during the first five miles or so, where it seemed to be going just as planned.  The second was discouragement, and it began around mile 10, i.e. hour 4.  I was running with Julie and I began to lament both our lack of preparation and the fact that I had decided to run the race as a pair.  We knew going in that we had not fulfilled our preparation goals: instead of running daily, we'd repeatedly run for a few days and then fallen off for a week or sometimes more.  Additionally, Julie was struggling and I reflected on how much better ...

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 discovered when I went back to compile a summary of 2015 as presented in my blog that I actually started blogging at the very beginning of January, 2015.  Here is a Part I of the year, with all of my posts linked throughout. January My first post was the major driver for the blog.  I imagined the conversations which would occur when friends and family asked how grad school was going the next time they saw me.  I wasn't sure how to explain that I'd failed out in a way that was both honest but accurately reflected the sense of pride I felt despite my leaving.  Even that seemed likely to sound like revisionism or denial though, so I figured a long-form explanation was needed.  When friends have left jobs or relationships I usually want to know the details, but I don't wish to pry.  I'd thought about blogging before, so I figured this was the time to start with the kind of explanation I'd like to hear if I knew me.  The post, " Lots to Cover: Le...

CHRISTMAS!! (and Hannukah too) I didn't grow up with Christmas, but I've always loved Hannukah.  When Julie moved in three years ago she introduced me to Christmas, which I rolled into Hannukah and New Years to fully transform December into one massive, blurred-together holiday.  I've never felt a conflict: as far as I'm concerned, Christmas is a secular holiday for me.  Jesus doesn't appear in most Christmas traditions, and happens to have been born in April.  For what it's worth, Hannukah isn't really a religious holiday either.  A few years ago I was making an exchange at Banana Republic in Pittsburgh and the clerk actually apologized for wishing me a Merry Christmas.  I told her that Hannukah sensitivity was thoughtful, but seemed unnecessary since it's not an actual religious holiday.  The mother in line behind me objected.  I wish I could say I kept my mouth shut, but the truth is I politely pointed out that God does not appear in t...

So much to cover! I went back to Pittsburgh for Hannukah and had a great vacation.  Julie was very nervous because she has complicated relationships with various friends and family members of mine.   My mother is somewhat off-put by Julie's eccentricities.  She also has been hurt by the blunt opinions Julie has shared on her blog in the past.  Julie has had a hard time forgiving my mother for past inhospitality.  It doesn't help that my mother has a strange unwillingness to every utter the word "sorry".  I know this is a cliche that I believe originated with The Fonz on Happy Days.  Her reasoning is based on some principle that has never made sense to me. The fourth night of Hannukah, before we left for Pittsburgh On the Sunday after we arrived, Julie and I went on a nature walk through Schenley Park with Mom and Harry. Taking off her sweatshirt before playing in the creek A falcon! More majestic birds On Monday we went to Phi...

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...