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Not true, stop repeating this. It's not a partisan issue.

Indeed. Anti-vaccination beliefs don't follow the usual political polarization.

Right-wing kooks see vaccinations as a government conspiracy. Left-wing kooks see vaccinations as a corporate conspiracy. Moderates vaccinate their kids.

This,

This kind of nutty thinking is the fault of extremism, not of any particular left/right view. In Australia, Anti-Vax typically follows the well-off hippie crowds who aren't short of a few bob but are typically far left voters (well far left for Australians) which we call "Champagne Socialists" here in the UK. Australia tends not to have the far-right religious kooks that plague the US, at least not in the numbers the US has and the few that they have are far more concerned in getting the government to ban porn and filter the websites they don't like.

The opposition to extremists is not an opposing form of extremist, but rather moderates.

Not true, stop repeating this. It's not a partisan issue.

Indeed. Anti-vaccination beliefs don't follow the usual political polarization.

Right-wing kooks see vaccinations as a government conspiracy. Left-wing kooks see vaccinations as a corporate conspiracy. Moderates vaccinate their kids.

Maybe it's just me, or the bulb(s) I've tried, but the light from LED bulbs seems more harsh -- for lack of a better word -- than from CFL or incandescent bulbs. Perhaps it's because of something like this: The scientific reason you don’t like LED bulbs — and the simple way to fix them.

My eyes do this MUCH more than the average person's eyes - so much so that on a recent visit to my GP she was concerned that I might have some neurological condition, until I explained that I had lived with this eye movement literally all my life. Yet even for me, "good" LED lights like the ones currently illuminating the room I'm in have no visible flicker. They use filter capacitors in the power circuitry, and/or phosphorescent persistence, to smooth out the 'ripple' in the light until it's vanishingly small.

--jenningsthecat

Am I wrong to consider energy efficiency problem with light bulbs largely solved? LED bulb are affordable and efficient. Is there anything else left to do?

Maybe it's just me, or the bulb(s) I've tried, but the light from LED bulbs seems more harsh -- for lack of a better word -- than from CFL or incandescent bulbs. Perhaps it's because of something like this: The scientific reason you don’t like LED bulbs — and the simple way to fix them.

SpaceX currently charges $62 million to launch 50k lb satellites

No, they say it costs $62 million for each Falcon 9 launch.

Form Earth.

So it would be pretty expensive to send gold to the moon. Luckily for people working on this plan, they only need to get gold from the moon back to the Earth - way cheaper since you just have to launch from the moon's gravity well, and basically takes controlled falling back to Earth to recover.

Also of course, SpaceX launch costs are predicted to get much cheaper over time.

You might say, well the rocket has to get there... true, but since it would go to the moon mostly empty to pick up shipments, it would could also have a paying cargo like satellites that get released before it heads to the moon.

The economic feasibility of the plan is good, just needs the BFR (which is more made for these kind of land and re-takeoff missions) to make it practical.

All you'd be paying for would be the rocket and not the fuel, which would be made on the moon. Heck you'l probably come back with some extra fuel so that would further reduce the cost of the flight as SpaceX could credit a mining org for that.

These days, murdering the innocent is mundane police business, and so is hiding the fact.

These days?

You are obviously a person with bad memory or in the flower of your youth.

Today's police violence/misconduct pales in comparison to the sheer majesty of brazen nefarious activities found in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

We don't need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. We just need to stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere.

The full effect of the excess CO2 already in the atmosphere won't be felt for at least 40 years.

And that's the "good" news - from the article:

It's possible that even as emissions decrease, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will continue to increase. The warmer the planet gets, the less carbon dioxide the ocean can absorb. Rising temperatures in the polar regions make it more likely that carbon dioxide and methane, another greenhouse gas that warms the planet, will be released from storage in the frozen land and ocean reservoirs, adding to the problem.

Wow, what an amazing conspiracy theory you have there

Not a theory

How'd you get modded up?

People with a clue must have got modpoints somehow.

I used to listen to police scanners all the time and they're boring as hell. A lot of mundane business.

These days, murdering the innocent is mundane police business, and so is hiding the fact.

Data privacy is so far down the list of problems in my life it barely registers.

That's because we don't directly see it, but it does harm society. Maybe if we received a notification every time an unseen corporation made a decision about us, we'd be more concerned as to what they are doing.

Six ways that big data systems are harming society

So the only negative there is that scientific progress might be slower?

There are many negatives to speices loss.
One is the the biotechnology and medical science that we will never have access to.
Another is the capacity of the world to carry life, including ours
Another is the risk of losing a species or group that collapses an important system for human survival.

We can find out which species are pollinators ....

Well, we'd have to put a lot of money into species identification if we're going to identify all the pollinators. And a lot of time.
But being a pollinator isn't the only mechanism by which a species is important to an ecosystem. There are fungi and bacteria that are critial for soil fertility and for nutrient supply.

... and ensure they are unaffected.

We are not yet able to ensure a species does not go extinct.

What does that even mean?

It means that we're depleting natural resources.
Overfishing. Overhunting. Fossil fuel use for fertilzer production and spreading. Forest clearing.

Can you provide a citation?

Here's a non-technical write up.

You can't have both. All climate change solutions I've seen so far are only affordable to people living a middle class lifestyle in a first world country.

In the poor parts of the world, according to this estimate for the year 2000, 160,000 people died because of the anthropogenic part of climate change.

Wind is cheaper than coal now, and that's without the health impacts of pollution.

Fossil fules are not affordable for the third world.

What problems specifically? Bad weather? Fires? Ice age? Desertification? Sea level rise?

Well, except "ice age", yes. Food shortage. Biodiversity loss. Disease. People Displacement. Famine. War.

Yeah those all suck, but none of those are extinction-level threats to humans.

The 30% population drop in Europe around the black death had impact on civilization, as skills were lost, and communities, child care and cultural norms broke down.
So there are things that are not extinction-level threats, that would never-the-less be good to avoid.

Amazon HQ2: Texas experience shows why New Yorkers should be skeptical ( https://theconversation.com/am... )

The Anti-Vax Movement is not a left/right issue. Instead, it is correlated with extremism in either direction. Right-wing nutjobs see vaccines as a government conspiracy. Left-wing nutjobs see vaccines as a corporate conspiracy. Moderates on both sides vaccinate their kids.

Anti-Vax beliefs don't follow the usual political polariization

Or maybe you should read the article.

I read the article. It doesn't explain what I actually needed to know. See, there has been a lot of speculation as to how reliable our estimates of the ages of craters on the moon have actually been. What TFA doesn't mention is that these findings are the result of "using a new method to date craters on the moon". The Guardian simply didn't bother to explain how they actually figured this out. As usual on Slashdot, we get the worst possible link attached to the story.

Given that FB has been accused of making shadow profiles of people not on FB, does deleting the App from a phone really achieve anything?

No .. I am not saying the outrage is not justified, just that is misdirected.

http://theconversation.com/sha...

There are two reasons that a business can reject cash even if it is “legal tender for all debts public and private.”

First, this statement means that the only circumstance when someone must accept the bill is when a person owes the business a debt. If no debt has been incurred, a person or business is not legally required to take U.S. currency.

Let us say it is very late at night and you need gasoline for your car. Many gas stations in the U.S. do not take large bills late at night to prevent robberies and theft. If the gas station requires customers to pay for gas before pumping it into their car, they have the legal right to refuse US$50 and $100 bills. They do not have to accept large bills because until the customer has put gas into the car, the customer does not owe the station owner anything. However, if the customer is allowed to pump gasoline into the car first and then pay, the owner must accept all types of U.S. bills because the customer has a debt to pay.

http://theconversation.com/if-...

I was googling along this articles thought process. And found the following.
2015 out of Australia - http://theconversation.com/uni...
2011 from the Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/te...

I have read the comments here, and actually have no quarrels with either argument. But this topic has been around for a long time, and probably will always be a topic.

Environmentalists already want to humanity to exclusively eat insects and pests
http://theconversation.com/eat...
So take meat off the menu, and add roaches, ticks, maggots, and leaches. Yum!

They also advocate for the reduction of 90%+ of earths population.
https://www.conservapedia.com/...
Think the people that remain will include you?

Now in addition they want to take away the ability to build buildings and roads from concrete, and certainly not wood, and most definately not harmful plastics, and forget glass. Environmentalists also do not approve of iron, steel or other refined metals (harmful gases, destructive to environment when mined, energy intensive).

Did you know that modern agriculture is a big producer of CO2 gases? Enviromentalists want this to go. No more corn, carrots or potatoes.

This is environmentalism. These are the facts.

https://theconversation.com/ca...
America is predicted to increase in 2018, but the EU will still decrease...
Per person America is still double China, even if China increases in 2018.

And yet, the MP's have no problem using messaging apps with strong encryption themselves.

The system can be traced to the Manusmriti code of Hindu laws, which suggests Brahma, the Hindu god of creation, created four categories of people from his own body: Brahmins from his head, Kshatriyas from his arms, Vysyas from his thighs, and Shudras from his feet.

This origin ordained an occupational hierarchy. You inherited your caste from your father, and that determined your future. The Brahmins were the priests and advisers – and primary enforcers of the caste system. The Kshatriyas were warriors and soldiers. Then Vysyas farmers and traders. The Shudras workers and tradespeople.

Beneath the Shudras were the Dalits – the “untouchables” – tasked with all menial jobs, including cleaning and disposing of the dead.

This might work with Australia's smarter wildlife.

Ha! First, the article is about Tasmania, where the wildlife is small in number, and suffering from inbreeding. Just like the people, allegedly.
But even in mainland Australia, the land animals are fairly primitive, having been isolated from mammalian evolutionary advances in the rest of the world for so long.
The smart native animals seem to be the ones that can swim or fly across the seas, so not as genetically isolated. e.g. dolphins, and parrots.

https://theconversation.com/bi...

Individuals might have gone out on a limb, but then individuals will believe almost anything.

How cute! You've cited one individual with a (seemingly) successful prediction to prove, that Climate Science is actually science, but are now dismissing multiple other individuals as "out on a limb", because their predictions have proved spectacularly wrong.

You can't have it both ways — cherry-picking some predictions as solidly scientific, dismissing others. The discipline's record remains in shambles and even its practitioners and adherents admit, it is "not always" falsifiable.

It is obvious, that Climate Science is not, so to speak. Perhaps, you need to argue from a more religious point of view, as these guys are doing (and as was predicted you'd do many years prior).

Unfortunately your data probably *is* being held by Facebook, even if you do not have an account.

Thanks for the response!

Except the memo (and most laws) consider sex and gender to be the same thing.

If Trump was putting out a memo recognizing they were different you would have a point. He isn't. He's putting out a memo that considers sex and gender to be the same thing, and only recognizing sex.

I would disagree with you. The government has no bearing on gender. A biological man cannot be arrested for wearing a dress as a result of anything Trump does, regardless if that man is doing it for drag or because they are transitioned. This still seems like the NYT is creating a mountain out of a mole hill to generate clicks.

What, exactly, is making light of it?

The far left kinda treats it as a feeling based thing that would be full of sunshine and rainbows. The far right treats it as a made up thing that is nothing but a mental disorder. The truth is somewhere in between.
It's kinda like the abortion thing. Far right: murder. Far left: let's make a song and dance about getting our abortions!

And their suicide rate goes way down post-transition.....unless you start demanding they be treated as their birth sex.

Do you have a source for this?
Hmm, most of the sources I've looked over doesn't mention the pre/post transition rates, but show that even while transitioned they have higher than usual rates. http://theconversation.com/fac... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

This shows that the rate is NOT significant influenced post-transition (going from 60% to 40% is a factor, but is still too damn high to call it "way down"). http://williamsinstitute.law.u...

Though it shows that people who "pass" as the gender have the lowest rates, but it is still 1/3. Interestingly enough, male-to-female suicide rates are higher, mirroring the higher rate of mens suicide compared to women. Makes sense if the hormonal development (testosterone) is responsible... but then you would think that hormone therapy would be better at preventing suicide attempts than counseling which doesn't seem to be the case.

They may or they may not be. Which is why the normal treatment is to block puberty until they are older and able to figure it out for sure. In the meantime, you gender them as they want to be.

Yeah, I guess I worded that one poorly. At the same time, kids can go through phases and want to please their parents. It is a tricky thing to be sure.

the link is in the top line right after the headline.

https://theconversation.com/le...

https://theconversation.com/le...

Indeed! Here's a review of this paper by Australia's well regarded nutritionist Rosemary Stanton, which independently has been assessed as presenting "a fair, balanced and accurate assessment of the research study.": https://theconversation.com/re...

Another way to look at the study findings is that if you are an uneducated older woman who smokes and has a low overall dietary quality, you may have a higher risk of Non Hodgkin's Lymphoma and breast cancer, particularly if you are obese!!

The reason kids get such a distorted view of sex is because it's restricted.

In Australia has had a boom in Labiaplasty. Being surgery Labiaplasty comes with risks, one of those risks being labia do serve a purpose so if you are too aggressive all sorts of problems arise. One reason women often give for wanting Labiaplasty is protruding labia causes discomfort, especially during activities like bike riding. That's downright perplexing to males who have much bigger and more sensitive things between their legs.

Another reason by given in well over 50% of women who have had a Labiaplasty is cosmetic. That has caused some head scratching in the sisterhood - why have cosmetic surgery for something hardly anyone sees? So the sisterhood have come up with a theory. (I'm using a bit of poetic licence here - but is is female academics who been studying this.)

Australia's porn censorship rules labia's were considered obscene. You could publish pictures of a vula, but the labia could not be visible. As a consequence there were lots of pictures of vulva everywhere including teenage girls magazines, but any labia were air brushed out. So just about every vulva a girl saw except her own had no visible labia.

I'm not sure what the censorship rules are in other countries, but if you look at that Wikipedia article Australia is the epicentre of this phenomenon. If this weird perspective on female anatomy is mostly restricted to us the girls might be onto something.

The reason kids get such a distorted view of sex is because it's restricted.

In Australia has had a boom in Labiaplasty. Being surgery Labiaplasty comes with risks, one of those risks being labia do serve a purpose so if you are too aggressive all sorts of problems arise. One reason women often give for wanting Labiaplasty is protruding labia causes discomfort, especially during activities like bike riding. That's downright perplexing to males who have much bigger and more sensitive things between their legs.

Another reason by given in well over 50% of women who have had a Labiaplasty is cosmetic. That has caused some head scratching in the sisterhood - why have cosmetic surgery for something hardly anyone sees? So the sisterhood have come up with a theory. (I'm using a bit of poetic licence here - but is is female academics who been studying this.)

Australia's porn censorship rules labia's were considered obscene. You could publish pictures of a vula, but the labia could not be visible. As a consequence there were lots of pictures of vulva everywhere including teenage girls magazines, but any labia were air brushed out. So just about every vulva a girl saw except her own had no visible labia.

I'm not sure what the censorship rules are in other countries, but if you look at that Wikipedia article Australia is the epicentre of this phenomenon. If this weird perspective on female anatomy is mostly restricted to us the girls might be onto something.

https://theconversation.com/tr... Go Trump

http://theconversation.com/wha...

Total and complete waste of money, but most on here probably already know this.

'Hugh Harkins, a highly respected author on military combat aircraft, called that claim “a marketing and publicity gimmick” in his book on Russia’s Sukhoi Su-35S, a potential opponent of the F-35. He also wrote, “In real terms an aircraft in the class of the F-35 cannot compete with the Su-35S for out and out performance such as speed, climb, altitude, and maneuverability.'

'Pierre Sprey, a cofounding member of the so-called “fighter mafia” at the Pentagon and a co-designer of the F-16, calls the F-35 an “inherently a terrible airplane” that is the product of “an exceptionally dumb piece of Air Force PR spin.” He has said the F-35 would likely lose a close-in combat encounter to a well-flown MiG-21, a 1950s Soviet fighter design'

'Robert Dorr, an Air Force veteran, career diplomat and military air combat historian, wrote in his book “Air Power Abandoned,” “The F-35 demonstrates repeatedly that it can’t live up to promises made for it. It’s that bad."'

You're right, it's neo-liberalism.

It's absolutely neo-liberalism!

Idiot Socialists bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Well obviously! Any socialist who buys into the mainstream of either of the Wall Street Parties is an idiot socialist almost by definition.

Meanwhile, the identitarian* "left," who really were the ones to buy in (and still are) leave little room for anything resembling Marxist analysis, "as [it's] white leftist men [who] love referencing Marx." Echos of "Bernie Bros"? All of which makes the misguided designation of these vampires as "cultural Marxists" all the more ridiculous.

[*which, I admit, is a loaded (but ultimately sound) way to refer to those who subscribe to "intersectional" identity theory.]

People who think such an earth-shatteringly vital issue such as whether they are addressed as 'he,' 'she,' 'them,' or 'it,' is somehow more important than the plight of the inter-generationally underemployed working class in the rust belt, for example, have no business passing themselves off as being of the left, much less as being the Left.

Meanwhile we've got a small minority of voters who have a disproportionate amount of power (a Montana voter has 46 times more power than a California one) that are forcing their will on the rest of us.

It's not a small minority: residents of 29 states (+ DC) have more voting power than the other states.

And the 46x power is theoretical; based on actual ballots cast, it's much less

That's not really what the study says.

That is EXACTLY what the study says. To quote: "The biggest gender gaps were in non-STEM subjects such as English, where girls earned 7.8% higher average grades and 13.8% less variable grades than boys.".

http://theconversation.com/spray-on-antennas-unlock-communication-of-the-future-103637

Don't make stuff up. Here's another article on the subject. I quote:

While BPA can have effects similar to the hormone estrogen, it is between 10,000 to 100,000 times weaker. In order to achieve an intake of BPA at the regulatory limit (which is 100 times less than the level which causes no effect in long term animal studies) by consuming canned soup, which has one of the highest levels of BPA (and taking the soup with the highest level of BPA), you would need to drink 100 cans of soup in a day to reach the acceptable exposure level.
However, the same reactivity that makes BPA good at turning into plastic makes it a good developer in thermal printer paper. BPA is mixed with proto-dye, where the paper is heated by the printer head, the BPA reacts with the proto-dye and a dark colour is produced. Not all thermal printer papers use BPA though.
The current paper “Holding Thermal Receipt Paper and Eating Food after Using Hand Sanitizer Results in High Serum Bioactive and Urine Total Levels of Bisphenol A (BPA)” looks at whether BPA-containing thermal receipt paper could be a significant source of BPA exposure for humans.
However, the conditions used in this experiment are quite unlike any realistic use of thermal paper. The subjects wet their hands with a hand sanitiser that penetrates the skin. They then held thermal paper in their wet hands for four minutes, after which they immediately handled and ate food.
If you have ever watched a cashier handle thermal paper, they typically hold it between thumb and forefinger (or thumb and first two fingers) for only a few seconds. This means that not only is the duration of exposure much smaller, the amount of skin surface area available for absorption is smaller, so much less material will be absorbed.
Even under these extreme conditions (whole, wet hands, four minutes holding, immediately handling and eating food), the BPA levels in the subjects blood all remained well under levels shown to have a biological effect, and was quickly eliminated from the blood. There was measurable levels of BPA, but 30 nanomolar BPA for the average maximum blood concentration (yes that is nano - which means 1x10-9 moles of substance per litre of blood, ie tiny) cannot by any means be thought of as “high” as per the title of the paper. The lowest biological threshold for BPA activity is 100 nanomolar, and this was only seen when cells in tissue culture were exposed to this concentration for three days! ...
cashiers handle thermal paper for a few seconds, they do this for hours on end, surely their overall exposure is much more than 4 minutes”.
However, BPA is rapidly inactivated in the body. Short exposure times (and much smaller skin surface exposed) means that very little BPA is taken in, and by the time the next exposure happens, even if it is only a couple of minutes, the BPA has been substantially removed. ...
As a reality check, subjects with dry hands (which is typically how people handle receipts) who held the receipts for the same long time showed no change in blood or urine BPA.

Drug that doesn't have its price gratuitously jacked sky high: The drug in TFS, yesterday and before.

I've never heard of a drug called "TFS", nor would I know anything about its price. That's not a citation.

Examples of loose IP laws allowing pharmaceuticals being manufactured cheaply

"Manufactured" is the key word here. Once the research is done and paid for, actual manufacturing may be cheap. Your very article is about poor countries being allowed to manufacture, what the pharmaceutical companies have researched and created — at high expense. That expense is being borne by the patients in the rich countries.

Example of state-owned pharmaceutical companies working

That link is also about manufacturing. The Chinese — quite telling for a Collectivist to offer China as an example — are particularly infamous intellectual property thieves.

Again, once it is known, mass-producing it may be cheap. Researching the next drug, however, is funded by the profits from the previous ones. Your attempts to tell companies: "No, you can not charge this much" — threatens those profits for them, and the availability of new drugs and treatments for the rest of us.

Keep your grabby Collectivist hands off — what you want, in essence, is price control, a notion far more evil and destructive than anything one CEO ill-trained in the Art of Public Relations could come up with.

There aren't any. Things either exist, or they don't. For new drugs to appear, years of effort — by highly-educated — is required.

This doesn't require supplication to infinite greed. Many drugs have been developed and sold profitably and somewhat affordably without massive gratuitous price increases - and that's with most of the money going into marketing rather than paying pharma research scientists!

At that point, I'll have a choice of either paying the "greedmonster", or doing without

At which point you would be maimed or killed by what ails you. What kind of choice is that? I'd prefer that you stop wishing harm on yourself and others so that you could be healed in this hypothetical scenario, but if you don't, this would be acceptable. Also I'm not nearly as angry at someone else making too much money as I am about sick people being extorted to greater illness or death for no reason other than to further enrich a few already very rich people.

You cited precisely zero such.

This shouldn't be necessary when the examples are so plentiful and easy to find, you're being obtuse, but I'll cite some anyway.

Drug that doesn't have its price gratuitously jacked sky high: The drug in TFS, yesterday and before.

Examples of loose IP laws allowing pharmaceuticals being manfuactured cheaply:

https://theconversation.com/wo...

Example of state-owned pharmaceutical companies working:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

In summary, as long as you can make a sufficient number of right-hand turns, you can get away without hanging a Louie.

UPS agrees with you sisters friend. http://theconversation.com/why...

It sure doesn't look like the populous states are pushing anyone around. What do you have against a nation of, for, and by the people?

https://theconversation.com/wh...

One key aspect of rehabilitating polluted lakes, rivers and estuaries is knowing whether actions are having a positive effect. This requires long-term environmental monitoring programs, which unfortunately have been scaled back in Florida and many other states due to budget cuts.

it's in such slow motion compared to human time scales that you may not recognize that you've passed the tipping point

Yeah. So slow, there may be no motion at all... We've been through this, riverat1, you know, what you need to do to prove, your discipline is an actual science (contrary to what some of its own practitioners admit), rather than a religion as some of the cheering disciples accept, and the critics mock.

So only you deserve protection from AC's? Perhaps you need to consider this: http://theconversation.com/how...

...The fusion guys get these reports and then say "well, we don't have a working reactor so we don't really know" and then stick their fingers in their ears and do the "la la la I CANNOT HEAR YOU" thing...

I like that. It's funny. And it could be that fusion energy is a fly-by-night used to bilk investors. It will forever be 20, 40, 50 years off (double entendre intended). Yeah, I dunno. There is a rumor that results from Big Data analytics is the reason Besos, Microsoft, Amazon, and others are investing here. Ah, it's probably just a ruse.

Oh, and I'm sure you know that there are fusion reactors working right now, just none in the commercial sphere. They're for research. Fusion energy has yet to reach a viable price point. Not yet.

https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/10042-Private-sector-companies-are-firing-up-the-fusion-race

http://theconversation.com/why-nuclear-fusion-is-gaining-steam-again-93775

where do you get your numbers ?
this is the first link I got : https://c1cleantechnicacom-wpe...
second link shows solar beating gas in the long term.
https://theconversation.com/wi...

Growing faster than any other kind of power.

And still miniscule.

False, and also, storage systems can do the job as well and are getting cheaper all the time.

So what major power grid relies solely on renewables, doesn't use nuclear, coal, natgas, or other "bad" fuel sources for base load?

They aren't. They generate very small amounts of power,

Growing faster than any other kind of power.

and require those evil fossil fuel base-load power plants to even be considered.

False, and also, storage systems can do the job as well and are getting cheaper all the time.

I once strongly believed in this, but to my left is a computer that is entirely capable of doing nuclear bomb simulation. I'm curious why there's never any models given that I can simply run.

There is.

http://theconversation.com/mak...
https://opensource.gsfc.nasa.g...

Carrying 10 more states and 77 more votes isn't really close. It was only a "close" race if you ignore the actual rules and result.

Of course the US doesn't elect it's president by the popular vote, but your numeric framing of the issue is even more misleading. Clinton got 2.86 million more votes from voters overall, but the electoral college means that what mattered was where those votes where more that just the number. It didn't matter if Clinton won California with 100% of the vote, and likewise it didn't matter if Trump won Utah with 100% of the vote. So to really figure out how close it was, you need to focus on the "tipping point" states, a combination of the closest states with enough EVs to swing the election depending upon their outcome. The "tipping point" state in the conventional definition of the term was Wisconsin, as losing that would have made her still lose the EC even if she had won the closer states of Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Clinton lost Pennsylvania by about 44.3k votes, Michigan by about 10.7k votes, and Wisconsin by about 22.7k votes. So those are the margins Clinton would have needed to make up to win, or a higher number of votes in a less optimal mixture of states.

I know Trump lives in the alternative reality where he won the popular vote somehow, but practically speaking his win in the EC was due to those margins, which is less than 100k votes total. That's pretty close for a presidential election. Not as close as 2000 and Bush vs Gore, but still pretty close.

I find the summary in great need of clarification. Let me attempt to clarify it in the hope that will be useful to other readers.

First, the linked article links to a much better summary written by one of the team members, Matt Woolley. I recommend you read it instead:
https://theconversation.com/ex...

Second, the summary conflates *mass* with *distance*. The experimenters claim to have entangled remarkably massive objects (compared to the mass of atoms, for example). But the summary says 'any attempt to increase the sizes has caused problems with stability' and that, taken literally, is not true. For example, here's an experiment from 1998 in which entanglement was maintained over a distance of kilometers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Finally, the summary claims 'a major step forward in our understanding of quantum physics' but I doubt that. It sounds to me like a major accomplishment but one that *confirms* our previous understanding of quantum physics in more massive systems.