Andrew R Gross

Last month my sister and her husband had a daughter.  This last weekend I went home for her naming.  I had a great time.  It was fun seeing family and the few friends I was able to say hello to during the 48 hours I was in town.

On Saturday, May 14th, Jack and I celebrated our 30th birthday.  Leading up, we'd had a few discussions about what we wanted from the party. I meant to post about the party after the actual party, but May was a busy month.  I'll cut to the chase: it was the best birthday party I've ever had. I try not to fall into the trap of assigning too much significance to birthdays.  Our lives are not lived for one regularly-spaced day every year, and it makes no sense to judge our live by the events of such a day.  That said, birthdays tend to be times of reflection and self-assessment, and having a bunch of awesome people party their asses off makes for a very positive self-assessment. The planning inspired a rare disagreement between Jack and myself.  He wanted to keep it casual and easy-going.  I wanted a spectacle, and I wanted the party to effect a mature impression.  I don't want red solo cups when I'm turning 30.  I don't want a party that looks...

This was a tumultuous month.  Jack's been preparing for a trip to Japan to conduct research for the summer.  In advance, however, his adviser explained to him that she doesn't see a path for him to finish his PhD in her lab.  This didn't preclude his completing his PhD in another lab, but Jack concluded that he'd tried several advisers and it seemed clear that grad school was not a productive environment for him.  He's still going to Japan, though. It's a situation I'm familiar with.  I left grad school at the insistence of my guidance committee two years ago.  It is a lot like a breakup.  Often, it is for the best, but that doesn't change the fact that it requires a major change in lifestyle and a period of uncertainty.  In my case, I can say from experience that it was definitely for the best.  I feel far more productive and positioned for long-term success in my current job.  I hope Jack finds the same outcome. In the meantime, he...

In preparation for Civil War, I pushed hard to finish the Arc Reactor prop I described in Part I .  Afterwards, I posted it to Reddit on the DIY forum .  It got a total of 3599 'upvotes' and 207 comments.  The next day, Jack told me that a coworker asked if his brother was Andrew, because she'd stumbled across the post, which had been reposted to another site entirely.  F' yeah. The finished product The inspiration Wearable Arc reactor prosthetic DIY

It has been a wild month.  On the 13th of April, Julie SMASHED her leg.  Totally f'd it all to h.  Then on May 6, we went to see Captain America: Civil War in theaters, in costume.  I was Captain America. This is the third time we've dressed up (cosplayed, it's called) for a movie.  My mom asked, "Is that something people do?"  Kinda, Mom.  Kinda.  People do it occasionally, although for a movie this size it's not quite as common.  Still, the reaction is fantastic.  People take pictures with you and geek out.  It's a lot of fun.  It's better with more people, and this time we rolled deep: eleven people were in our group, five in costume. This costume was a real milestone for me.  I've always enjoyed making costumes for Halloween and such.  Usually, I've relied on resourcefulness and lucky finds at Goodwill.  Often, the key is distilling a character's look into a few key items/colors/shapes/icons etc to make i...

Julie broke her leg when she got hit while riding her motorcycle.  This happened two weeks ago, so anyone reading this probably already heard.  She'll be fine, but for now her left leg is in an external fixator, which is a bunch of rods and pins holding her bones in place though her skin. While I'm on the subject, though, I'm going to describe my observations while Julie was recuperating at Dignity Health -- formally California Hospital -- in down town LA. The short version is that Dignity Health is a bad hospital.

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...