Hi, I'm david (b) hayes.

Making Multicellular Life

We made a group of single-celled organism start cooperating in a lab. This was one of those things that people were struggling to prove, but now it’s been done. I thought I’d let you know.

(via Justin Wehr Knows Stuff You Don’t)

Batman is a Conservative

Reginald D Hunter lays out the case.

(via r/videos, where someone points to a discussion of what the D stands for)

The Salaried Bourgeoisie

I enjoy occasional dips into the field of Marxist cultural analysis, but I know it’s not for everyone. If you like it too, or are just interested to try some, this piece by Slavoj Žižek highlights many of the best things that those theories can contribute to out modern understanding of the world. A sample:

If the old capitalism ideally involved an entrepreneur who invested (his own or borrowed) money into production that he organised and ran and then reaped the profit, a new ideal type is emerging today: no longer the entrepreneur who owns his company, but the expert manager (or a managerial board presided over by a CEO) who runs a company owned by banks (also run by managers who don’t own the bank) or dispersed investors. In this new ideal type of capitalism, the old bourgeoisie, rendered non-functional, is refunctionalised as salaried management: the new bourgeoisie gets wages, and even if they own part of their company, they earn stocks as part of their remuneration for their work (‘bonuses’ for their ‘success’).

(via The Browser)

Purell and Torture

An interesting and brief little history of product placement. It’s one of those forces that we take for granted today, but this was a new observation to me:

“The Paradox of Product Placement,” in which the titular conundrum is defined: “If you notice, it’s bad. But if you don’t notice, it’s worthless.”

(via @austinkleon)

The Reason for American Football’s Inevitable Decline

Jonah Lehrer highlights a topic that I’ve heard a lot of talk about over the last few years, but don’t think ever made it to the blog. He starts with a very interesting premise:

[American football] won’t be undone by a labor lockout or a broken business model — football owners know how to make money. Instead, the death will start with those furthest from the paychecks, the unpaid high school athletes playing on Friday nights. It will begin with nervous parents reading about brain trauma, with doctors warning about the physics of soft tissue smashing into hard bone, with coaches forced to bench stars for an entire season because of a single concussion.

Parking in LA

This is a great wide-ranging piece about parking, urban design, and the appeal to visitors of those methods used in various southern California cities. But it’s better that that kind of dry sentence, I swear. It starts with an interesting anecdote about the rather famous Disney Hall:

Yet before an auditorium could be raised, a six-floor subterranean garage capable of holding 2,188 cars needed to be sunk below it at a cost of $110 million—money raised from county bonds. Parking spaces can be amazingly expensive to fabricate. In aboveground structures they cost as much as $40,000 apiece. Belowground, all that excavating and shoring may run a developer $140,000 per space. The debt on Disney Hall’s garage would have to be paid off for decades to come, and as it turned out, a minimum schedule of 128 annual shows would be enough to cover the bill. The figure “128” was even written into the L.A. Philharmonic’s lease.

(via @hotdogsladies)

Hornets vs Honey Bees

Holy cow this Kottke post is awesome! A very well made video, and a very interesting piece of relevant information that’s not in the video.

Ross Douthat does a pretty good job pinning down why Americans afford their politicians so little breathing room for their personal life:

But by turning their personal choices to political ends, politicians lose the right to complain when those same personal lives are subject to partisan critiques. They can and should contest these critiques, but they can’t complain about them. In a culture as divided about fundamental issues as our own, the kind of weird attacks that Rick Santorum is enduring come with the vocation he has chosen.

Quick Guide to Asian Character Recognition

A surprisingly helpful (a simple) guide explains how to tell Korean, Japanese, and Chinese writing apart. It’s also rather profane in each of those languages.

(via r/funny, where you can find out exactly how it’s profane)

How Doctors Die

This is another one of those stories I saw a few times before I paid attention to. My excuse is that it’s poorly titled, it’s more about the broken American system of end of life care than it is about strictly “how doctors die.” (A problem whose most visible manifestations was all the hubbub about “death panels” some years ago.)

If you’re really interested in that topic, PBS’s Frontline’s Facing Death (from about a year ago) was another worthwhile treatment of the problem.

(via kottke)