So, on one of the episodes (John Carter, maybe?), y'all were mentioning how Ioan Gruffudd looks like Dominic West. And I recently watched Fantastic Four, and sure enough, thought to myself "hey! it's poor man's Dominic West!".

And then I found this. Those guys went to the same acting school! Go figure.

Hey, I'm seeing double, here! FOUR Dominic Wests!

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".

On the subject of internet creativity, if anyone's not already familiar with this: http://arrestedwesteros.com/. Game of Thrones screengrabs with entirely appropriate Arrested Development quotes. You'd think this shit would get real old, real quick, but bobdamn if it doesn't just keep delivering.

Well, now I wanna see a crossover called Not-So-Full House Stark.

Orphan Black.

Have you ever been in a situation with a show where you wanna run around shouting "hey everyone! watch this, trust me, you'll love it!" but didn't know how? That's how I feel about this show.

Mainly I wanna avoid hype-backlash. It's like we're still afraid to admit that TV has gotten seriously fucking good in the past two decades, so everyone oversells everything. It just started its second season, and I have a feeling it'll build up a cult status, and then a lot of people will be saying "best show ever", and then backlash (exactly what happened with True Detective). 
But man, this is a really enjoyable show. The lead performance is excellent. The show gets more confident with every episode, and they mix tension and humour really really well.
This show has every opportunity to fail, but by bob, everything keeps working and it just keeps getting better and better.

Here's the premise. Knowing the reveal (which is made explicit by the 3rd episode) absolutely does not alter your enjoyment of the show, but it would still be preferable to go in knowing nothing. So if you're not willing to give it a go on my word alone:

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.