Stuff we're reading / watching / listening to

[Violet]

http://lifehacker.com/your-living-wage- ... 1541333892 I thought this was interesting to play around with. You need to click through to the MIT page, but the lifehacker summary is useful, so I'm linking there.

[UffishThought]

Just read and then watched Cry, the Beloved Country. I'm glad I did both. But I have a hard time seeing James Earl Jones as South African.

[Digit]

Ode to the brain

[Random]

Doubt is a fantastic play.

[Portia]

Just watched Before Sunrise. (I actually saw Before Midnight this summer.) I don't think the ending would ever happen nearly 20 years later (no letters, no phone calls, no contact between the star-crossed lovers). It's interesting to think what has been gained or lost with the death of a certain kind of serendipity.

[Digit]

How ebola virus avoids the immune system.

Tetherin is one of the immune system's responses to a viral infection. If working properly, tetherin stops the infected cell from releasing the newly made virus, thus shutting down spread to other cells. However, this study shows that the Ebola virus has developed a way to disable tetherin, thus blocking the body's response and allowing the virus to spread....Previous research had found that tetherin plays a role in the immune system's response to HIV-1, a retrovirus, and that tetherin is also disabled by HIV.

Interesting.

[Emiliana]

How ebola virus avoids the immune system.

Tetherin is one of the immune system's responses to a viral infection. If working properly, tetherin stops the infected cell from releasing the newly made virus, thus shutting down spread to other cells. However, this study shows that the Ebola virus has developed a way to disable tetherin, thus blocking the body's response and allowing the virus to spread....Previous research had found that tetherin plays a role in the immune system's response to HIV-1, a retrovirus, and that tetherin is also disabled by HIV.

Interesting.

I'm not going to claim I understood all of that, but let me just say, HOLY CRAP ebola is bad business.

[Digit]

According to the WHO, "Asymptomatic infection in pigs has been reported and experimental inoculations have shown that RESTV cannot cause disease in pigs."

I wonder if pigs have a different tetherin production mechanism with which ebola can't interfere or if they have present some other proteins that stop the ebola from interfering or something else. I wonder the pigs are also unaffected by HIV.

[Portia]

Possible over-prescription of anti-depressants (and the come-down isn't great either)

[Digit]

Kepler-186f, the first Earth-size Planet in the Habitable Zone Interesting. Its star is smaller than our sun and its year is about 130 Earth days. I wonder if there's life on that planet.

[Digit]

I watched Mr. Nobody on Netflix last night. I like movies that look at what would happen if one small thing had been slightly different, and that was pretty much this whole movie with multiple threads throughout. Nice soundtrack too. I like Au fond des bois.

[Portia]

Who's on your most read authors list on Goodreads? (Access it under My Books.) For me, it's P. G. Wodehouse with 9, Agatha Christie with 7, and F. Scott Fitzgerald with 5. Sounds about right.

I also just jumped on the bandwagon and ordered Piketty's Capital. It astounds me that a 600 (700?) page book on economics is sold out at Amazon. o_O

[Whistler]

Nabokov (11), Haruki Murakami (10) and DF Wallace (7)

there are still a few Nabokov books I haven't read though...

[mic0]

JK Rowling with 8! Does Harry Potter really count as 7 different books? Then Brandon Sanderson at 4, and Fitzgerald at 3. I guess I don't tend to stick with one author. That said, there are a lot of authors I've been hankering for lately so hopefully my author stats will go up.

Whistler, I'm guessing since you've read so much Nabokov you really like him? I enjoyed Lolita a lot but haven't really looked into his other stuff.

[Whistler]

Yeah, when I first entered my English lit grad program (the one I dropped out of) I wanted to write my thesis on Nabokov... but the professor I was going to work with left BYU. Pale Fire is the one you should probably read if you want to read something else by him, although Pnin is pretty funny. I think Yarjka has read a lot of his works too.

I have mixed feelings about Nabokov because he gets really esoteric and snobby (his lectures on literature reveal this), but he's also brilliant and at times, entertaining. Kind of like the Jonathon Blow (creator of Braid who is super-dedicated and also comes off as elitist/snobby) of the literary world.

[Katya]

Kurt Vonnegut (13)
Terry Pratchett (12)
Diana Wynne Jones (11)
C. S. Lewis (11)
J. K. Rowling (9)
Douglas Adams (8)
Maya Angelou (8)
Jasper Fforde (8)
Lee Martin (8)
Oliver Sacks (8)

[Digit]

Ha. An interactive YouTube video. Can you understand what this little girl called Honey Boo Boo is saying without the subtitles?

[mic0]

Just finished Tender is the Night, looked up "Dick Diver" and found out there is an Australian band called Dick Diver. Not bad. I wonder if they named themselves after the character, or it is a coincidence. (Found an interview, yes it is from the book.)

[Indefinite Integral]

This.

I laughed so much. I thought you all might appreciate it.

[Katya]

This.

I laughed so much. I thought you all might appreciate it.

Nice.