... what will it do to Facebooks competition?

Also "regulating" a company the size of Facebook could easily become a case of the tail wagging the dog, e.g. when "coordinating" policies, writing "drafts" for legislation, structuring this censoring apparatus and good old revolving door politics.

This could result in Facebook not only "regulating" their own content, but also defining the rules for others.

The accounts could be renamed (applies also to tweets and references) and marked somehow.

I find it problematic already, that tweets can be deleted from a conservation robbing the answering tweets their context.

To my knowledge the vegan patties are grilled on another part of the grill, which means any animal fats "contaminating" them can only be mere trace amounts (and the 0% may still be valid if considered as a rounded number).

So what is the problem with an unnoticeable trace amount of animal fats in your food? They can't have any effect on health, and no animal will be saved if those patties are grilled on a different device.

That leaves only ideological or religious dogmatism as "reason" for the demand to use distinct cooking devices.

I honestly don't see how.

The experiments are concerned with the (mostly) electronic ground state in crystal lattices, i don't see how that can have a significant effect on the nuclei that would facilitate fusion reactions.

As far as i understand it:

They hit their material with a laser, it transitioned to another (higher energy) state, and that state decayed again (quickly).

An excitation can be observed e.g. in a hydrogen atom: Hitting it with light of just the right frequency excites it to a higher energy state, i.e. the electron goes into a (energetically) "higher" quantum state and that state decays emitting light.

In the experiment it's not a hydrogen atom, but a many particle system. In such systems, e.g. in crystals, the lowest energy state may be one in which the electrons (and nuclei) obey a macroscopic order stretching the whole crystal, and arrange in a highly coordinated state. One commonly known example of such behavior is ferromagnetism, where due to quantum mechanical (exchange) interaction the valence electrons of a crystal domain preferably have their spin point in the same direction to reach lowest energy state (that way the exclusion principle reduces electric interaction between same charged electrons).

One such many particle state is a charge density wave. There the electrons are not evenly spread across all (equivalent) lattice sites, instead their density may for example alternate between high and low, alternating from layer to layer in a lattice(*). In their material that is the lowest energy state. They managed to get the material to another energy state, where the charge density wave is in a perpendicular direction, and they showed, that that state quickly decays and the crystal goes back to the ground state.

I think the remarkable thing here is, that they observed quantum state transitions for a larger (many particle) system.

As for the "unseen state of matter": They managed to get LaTe3 to a state it usually isn't in, but there are similar materials (replacing La with another element) where that transition happens at a specific temperature. As usual the headline is disappointingly misleading.

(*):
The crystal structure they work with has one direction that is "special" compared to the other two.

... and since when is it science to consider the number of believers/followers a scientific argument?

As i see it that approach is problematic since FB has a quasi monopoly on social media.

Do you really want to empower monopolists to blackmail anyone who disagrees with their political views?

But isn't anyone a bit worried, that FB appointed themselves judges who may and who may not take part in the public exchange of views on an equal footing?

With the size of FB and its dominance of social media it's not just any private company. So they have significant power to influence and shape the public discussion e.g. of political issues according to their agenda, whatever that may be, and they obviously decided to use it.

I think it's an abuse of power similar to that of Rupert Murdoch using his News Network to further his political agenda.

Very well put.

What he did is like a "proof" that 1=0.
The only thing you can do afterwards is to seek out the error/wrong assumption.

And since his whole idea is based on special relativity it is a purely "mathematical" thing, in the sense that his result is inconsistent with the theory he is using.

But why did NASA let him go public with this nonsense? Does his staff hate him that much?

And why did none of all the journalists (at least of which i could find an article about this) at least try to get an informed opinion? Why do they present this undergraduate homework assignment gone wrong as if it were something worthwhile?

Well, this guy works at NASA as "Manager, Science and Technology Office" at "Marshall Space Flight Center".

I would think that post comes, if not with a solid background in physics, at least with access to people that have such a background.

The device measures really tiny forces exerted on a glass bead. While that part in itself could (probably) be made quite small the problem is to first shield all the other, much larger forces, or at least control and counteract them to a precision that still allows for those tiny forces to be measured.

Gravity is an extremely weak force, only because we sit on a chunk of matter the size of the earth it is so noticeable. So i don't think using gravity waves for information transfer is a good option.

Also i don't even want to consider the "pollution" in the bands easily technically accessible. Shielding gravity waves is much harder than EM. Think electromagnetic compliance, then apply that to gravity shielding for any device with quickly moving/vibrating parts.

Basically his whole scheme is based on (his understanding of) special relativity. That means he has to apply the concepts of special relativity consistently. You can't just mix in a bit of nonrelativistic physics (unless it also holds in special relativity) and expect it to work properly.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
(yeah, wikipedia, but they usually get these things right).

See the 6th slide of the presentation.

Essentially it says, the momentum (in z-direction) can be changed without applying a force in z-direction. This is key, since that force would result in a counteracting force, essentially rendering the whole scheme nil.

See also this discussion of the relativistic equivalent to F=ma:
http://www.desy.de/user/projec...
"The acceleration is not necessarily parallel to the force that produced it,"

Under "conservation of momentum" he discusses, that some kinds of "fields" could be "emitted", so that momentum is conserved.

That is the case, but then these fields are the "propellant" that is "expended". If you allow for emission of electromagnetic fields just shine light out of the rear end and you get your acceleration, that is already well understood, boring physics and doesn't need a complicated engine, just a radiation source.

And when he writes "Conservation of momentum is not well understood" ... well, maybe first read up on it, to know at least what *is* already understood.

This is what i don't understand about the whole thing:
Why didn't he (a) scour the internet and at least check the basics (instead of running numbers through silly excel sheets), and (b) talk to some expert who knows this stuff (e.g. someone giving lectures in special relativity) and can discuss the obvious problems?

... but also against the very principles it was built upon. The most important of those principles is "free as in freedom" which includes the freedom to express your opinion.

And it is not only one employee abusing his privileges as an FSF employee, but also the FSF not condemning those actions nor making an effort to identify and oust the wrongdoer. It seems like a majority in the FSF organisation doesn't even consider the defacement as "wrongdoing".

The game has you run "down" through a maze that scrolls upward, the maze is symmetrical consisting of rows of 16 blocks that can be either wall or free (and walls to both sides). The algorithm is tasked to provide the next bottom row consisting of 8 bits of information (mirrored to make 16).
For each block in the (left half of) new row the decision to make it free or wall is based on the two blocks left of it and the three blocks directly and diagonally above. These 5 bits point to the lookup table which decides if the block is free, wall, or decided by a random generator (for the first and last bock there are slight modifications introducing additional randomness).

The algorithm did not work perfectly, in the game "wall breakers" could be collected to open dead ends.

Two accounts (gained from interviews) about the origin of the maze algorithm are given:

Paul Allen Newell:
"Duncan and I went out for a beer and ended up coming up with this “problem” of wondering whether one could generate an endless maze that always had a solution’ and that ‘We worked out the algorithm and [...] I spent a weekend coding something up."

Steve Sidley (the programmer tasked with writing the game based on the algorithm):
"The basic maze generating routine had been partially written by a stoner who had left. I contacted him to try and understand what the maze generating algorithm did. He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out of his brain, he coded it up in assembly overnight before he passed out, but now could not for the life of him remember how the algorithm worked."

His main gripe seems to be, that he can't control how a movie he makes will look when and where it is shown. E.g. the TV-set will process the pictures to alter the dynamic range, and the audience isn't even aware of that, or what it should look like.

It's like a photographer making an image with a nice blurry background to highlight the object in focus seeing his images displayed by some software that removes all that blurriness and make it all crispy sharp.