O.K. folks, so this was a wierd one for sure. I'm mean seriously, on one team, you've got it stacked with 2 or 3 giant squids (the big female variety as well) plus a roster so deep as to command 97% of the animal kingdom; and on the other, you got these itty bitty viruses with some real scary ass ball-handling finesse.
It was crazy, just crazy...
I mean, just think of it like this. If we were to suppose that this red pixel (just a bit down from here) is the real size of an HIV virion (using mature HIV virion estimates of about 1.3 x 10-7m and the size of a 72dpi pixel as 3.5 x 10-4m).
Then the relative size of the basketball would be such that the view from the top of the basketball, would look a little bit like this:
Which is essentially the view looking north from about 2100m up (you can see the Los Angeles skyline, and white circle with the red line is the Staple Centre). I'm mean holy freakin' ball handling on the part of the HIV team!
Mind you. The Giant Squids themselves (note that the females are capable of being up to 13m in size), if extrapolated in size according to the "pixel = HIV virion" scale... well, the view from the squid, as it lunged up for, say, a lay up would look like this:
This being 21 miles straight up, and the circled entity containing the white speck of the Staple's Centre.
And seriously, people, can such a game even be fairly refereed? I mean, with the range of scales here, how effective could the officiating really be?
In any event, the game started off pretty slow, as you can imagine with many of the invertebrates clearly confused with basketballs seemingly floating on their own. HIV was confident, and why not? They had pretty much waltzed their way to the final eight, confident that nothing could stop them - maybe slow them down, maybe even control them to a certain degree, but certainly not stop them.
But this confidence only lasted for a short while. Largely eroded by a few simple realities:
1. Many of the invertebrate players simply weren't even cognscent of the awesomeness that many feel surrounds virology and HIV in particular. It's not like they follow the research literature for these particular fields. Truth be told, many of them are illiterate, and the ones who do read, prefer fantasy and sea adventures. Anyway, suffice to say, there was no fear factor here.
2. Invertebrates, by definition, are not possessed of the usual bone structure necessary for hematopoietic cell production. i.e. the very cells that are targeted by the nasty virus. Which means that even if the invertebrates were more literate, it wouldn't have mattered anyway, because they are essentially imprevious to HIV.
and 3. HIV team members are very literate - even have their own book club thing going on. Except that the current book they were reading was some thing called "The Secret." Anyway, totally threw them off.
Overall, this meant that HIV was very soon outclassed by the much deeper invertebrate team. But seriously though - who do you think was going to win in a physical contest when one opponent happens to be 10 million times bigger than the other?
Anyway, final score: 178 to 34. Invertebrates win by a landslide.
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You're right. I don't beleive it. I haven't picked a winner since the first round!