Viral Guessing Game
Julia introduced me to Metazooa, a taxonomic guessing game. You're trying to figure out what animal the computer has chosen. Each time you guess the computer will reveal the lowest taxonomic clade that they both belong to. For example, if you guessed platypus and the answer was humans then it would tell you they were both mammals, since they have nothing else in common taxonomically.
We played a bit and it was fun, and then I wanted to play a version with human-infecting viruses. They have one for plants (Metaflora) but not for viruses, so I made my own: Metahomoviria. The code is on github.
The first version had ~200 human-infecting viruses and wasn't very fun because you probably haven't heard of most of them:
...
80941 Guaroa virus
273341 Ilesha virus
35514 Keystone virus
11580 Snowshoe hare virus
11577 La Crosse virus
273352 Macaua virus
348013 Madrid virus
35515 Melao virus
...
But I've trimmed it down to 42 reasonably well known viruses and it's better now:
11234 Measles
2560602 Mumps
11250 Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)
1570291 Ebola
11292 Rabies
1980413 Hantavirus
11320 Flu A
...
It still isn't all that fun—what's the difference between Picornavirales and Picornaviridae and is there really so far from being a property Picornavirales have in common that it needed to be an acronym—but I like it. And I do feel like I'm getting a better feel for which viruses are genetically closer to each other.
If this sounds interesting, play with it here.
You might try beatdarwin.com although it doesn't have viruses yet! But its a hard taxonomic game although admittedly I use common names rather than latin names for the benefit of the general public. How did you discover the Metazooa game Jeff?