Hmm.
We have the books, which could be used to spoil the tv series. But, if the tv show catches up and overtakes, they'll be able to spoil the books. So, is this an unprecedented situation in pop culture?
It's going to make for an interesting online dynamic if that happens. I think I feel tentatively uncomfortable.

Holy crap that's good! Much better than "The Little Crastcals".

Ha, yeah, when you say it like that it sounds awfully specific.

For me, my supervisors had gotten a grant for a research proposal that would be developing a framework for spatial ecology (pretty broad subject, not too specific). They used that money to fund me and two other PhD students, and we're all working on slightly different things. The thing that helped me zero in on what I wanted to do was that I'd spent a year programming (nothing fancy, just R) and found out I really, really liked it, so that led to me focusing my PhD on programming huge community simulations. Also, I just kinda dig the way processes change over different scales (my Master's project was on that) and that fits neatly with the PhD stuff. Also also, our particular use of phylogenetics is really new, and it's a pretty badass approach.

For other people, a supervisor has a really specific project in mind and is basically outsourcing their research to a PhD student who (hopefully) is interested in that subject. (One PhD I saw offered was "the evolutionary origin of mussels" which felt like the most depressing thing I'd ever read. I'm not one for tunnel vision). Other people are selected by a supervisor and have a choice of 5 or 6 projects within the same subject. It really varies a lot.

Thanks! My dissertation? Oh boy.

Short answer: metacommunity phylogenetics.

Long answer: I'm trying to work out the relative contributions of different ecological processes, to community structure/diversity. I'm gonna simulate communities (birth, death, competition etc) and have linked communities (metacommunities) using immigration and dispersal. The phylogenetics (evolutionary relatedness) part uses evolutionary trees to work out what patterns we expect to see in a community, and then whether species are more or less ecologically similar than we expect. This then gives us clues about what processes are going on (competition leads to species in a community being less similar, while habitat selection leads to them being more similar than expected by chance).

That is as concise an explanation as I can give! It's really neat stuff.