blogorrhea: Friday Water Cooler

Complex life a billion years earlier than thought? (phys.org). Well-preserved multicellular structures dating to 1.5 billion years ago have been found in China. The question is: What are they? Bacterial mats? Or eukaryotic "tissues" of some kind?

What the heck is it? Organic fragments extracted from the host rock of the Gaoyuzhuang fossils show well-preserved cellular structure. Credit: Maoyan Zhu.

Why Does Happiness Inequality Matter? (greatergood.berkeley.edu). Maybe income inequality isn't the only thing we should be concerned about? Read, also, the lessons from Bhutan.

The Privatization of Childhood Play (psmag.com). A serious essay about playdates.

Gallup: Americans Favor Single-Payer Health Care System (gallup.com). Only 37% of Americans oppose socialized medicine, a deeply embarrassing and inconvenient fact for Hillary Clinton, who vows that single-payer health care will "never, ever happen" in the U.S.

Teen with Brain Tumor Barred from Prom (mcclatchydc.com).

A Eukaryote without a Mitochondrial Organelle (cell.com). Another anomaly for bio-geeks. Of course, true bio-geeks know this is not the only such organism ever discovered. But it's still fascinating.

The Dark Web Has Its Own Literary Magazine (wired.com).

How to Memorize a Random 60-Bit String (isi.edu). From nonsense poetry, security.

Chrome Is About to Kill Flash (theregister.co.uk). Oh hell yes, do it now!

We All Pay for Low Wages (counterpunch.org). From the article:

Raising the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour would save an estimated $17 billion per year for U.S. taxpayers, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute. The EPI’s study, “Balancing paychecks and public assistance,” found that, not surprisingly, low wages equal government help.

Purged, Hacked, Switched: On Election Fraud Allegations in Hillary Clinton vs Bernie Sanders (counterpunch.org). "For those who did vote provisionally or by affidavit, the vast majority of their votes have not counted. This includes 91,000 uncounted affidavit ballots in New York City alone and 20,000 uncounted provisional ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona." Funny, I thought this was supposed to be a democracy.

U.S. special forces wage secretive 'small wars' against terrorists (cnn.com). Your tax dollars at work.

Yanis Varoufakis on Why Hillary Clinton is a Dangerous Person (businessinsider.com). A fine one-minute video.

Does The Placebo Effect Influence Consumer Product Purchases? (npr.org). Novices play better golf when they have expensive brand name equipment.

Thanks for visiting. Be sure to check out prior weeks' Water Coolers (see links at right).

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