2:59a - viruses vs the immune system
I'd love to see a plot showing "number of viruses exposed" vs "probability of infection", where subjects are injected with viruses in varying quantities.
Presumably a single virus (what do you call an individual virus?) isn't enough to make you sick most of the time. I imagine we'd be sick all the time if that were the case...
If you inject a single virus into bloodstream, is it most likely to get lost, get blocked or reproduce?
Can we develop immunity by low-grade exposure to a virus?
My question also applies to other microbial parasites.
How come I never had to worry about this in the past?
---
I want my hash table to encode an equivalence relation (permutations of node labels), automatically dealing with my label-switching problem.
---
Do any of the normal languages/libraries let you pass an equality test, and adapt the hash function accordingly? I imagine you'd need to pass a function that brings the objects into a normal form.
---
I've installed R's hash library, but it seems to be pretty basic.
11:44p - Carl Zimmer
Today I saw Carl Zimmer talk about the evolution of viruses, specifically how they cross the species barrier (between birds, pigs and humans). Although birds seem to be the (direct or indirect) source of all human viruses, and even though they harbor all the Hs from 1 to 16, it is pigs that seem to be good at promoting "viral sex", i.e. recombinations between different virus types. Apparently, industrial-scale pig-farming barns seem to be huge labs for viral creativity.
There is concern that the 60%-deadly H5N1 might evolve the ability to spread from human to human, but it still seems to be 13 mutations away from doing that. I found this number awfully precise, and upon questioning, he told me that these 13 genes are the ones that are always present when you look at the 'diff' between bird-virus and human-virus, i.e. right before and right after it migrates to humans. The "always", however, only refers to the great pandemics, of which there are 3... so I'm concerned about the statistical significance of this.
He showed us this awesome video from NPR (who knew they made videos!):
QOTD: "The virus lives in the tropics year-round, and comes up North during our winter. If it's any consolation, they come here to die"
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
gustavolacerda's journal