Quantum Presidential Arrest

Trump has been arrested becoming the first former president to do so. Also, Tennessee lawmakers are pulling some bullshit, the EU is having Nintendo repair stuff forever, we did SCIENCE and VR is not as gripping as we thought

Quantum Presidential Arrest

"Home Alone" guest star charged with 34 counts of bad documents

Trump has been arrested because of 34 felony charges of falsified business records. This is the first time we've seen a former President arrested. So, significant, but we can do better. I can think of a few other war criminals walking around.

Anyway, Trump made bad text on paper regarding the origins of the hush money payments he made to two women over affairs he had with them.

He went to NYC, got arrested, plead "not guilty" and then went back to Florida. That's… that's basically the entire story so far.

Far, far more immediately notable is the bullshit in Tennessee

So here's the order of operations:

  1. Gun related mass murder in the state
  2. A large group of students peacefully protested at the state house, which Republicans are trying to label as an insurrection
  3. Notably, nobody was hurt, no fighting happened among protestors, and there was no property damage
  4. Three Democrats stood with the protestors
  5. Republicans are trying to expel those Democrats from their seats at the state house.

So basically, we've got a political party trying to oust members of the other party because those people stood with their constituents in peacefully demanding action on a public health crisis.

Just nothing all that in case anyone wanted further clarity on where we are vis-a-vis literal fascists in our government.

Hey maybe strong regulation is kinda good

Nintendo is being compelled by the EU Commission to fix Nintendo Switch controllers free of charge, forever. And announcement made on Mastodon, no less!

If you are not familiar, the Nintendo Switch comes with two detachable "Joy-Con" controllers. These controllers have been notoriously plagued with "drift" issues, where one or both of the analog sticks just, well, drift.

Nintendo has been through a ton of lawsuits about this, and already has been allowing (well, compelled to allow) owners to send in their controllers to be fixed. However, the EU Commission reached out to Nintendo to request for them to really make this right, and Nintendo is now committing to an offer to repair all Joy-Cons free of charge beyond the original legal warranty.

A company being compelled to do right by the consumer? Neato!

SCIENCE

I have no idea what the actual implications of this are, but holy wow this is cool. Some scientists led by PhD Student Romain Tirole have recreated the famous double slit light experiment, but with time???

The Young's double slit experiment is a famous physics THING that showed light acting as both particles and waves. Shine a light through two parallel slits and measure how the light changes on the other side of the holes. This version instead used a metamaterial which is capable of being manipulated at incredible speeds via lasers n shit. So they manipulated it at the femptosecond level and then shined light at it and measured a diffraction pattern similar to the double slit experiment, but rooted in time???

I have no idea, but was just very cool to read because we're doing SCIENCE.

VR not really doing it for teens right now

Despite what you may think when you think about VR's grip on THE YOUTH, it's really not all that significant.

A recent poll has shown that while about 30% of polled teens own a headset, only 4% use it daily, and only 12% use it even once a week. The numbers really aren't that awful, but compare to 87% polled who own iPhones that they use daily, it's just not really panning out to be "the next major platform" as it has been more or less billed.

VR is still neato. But uh, maybe we shouldn't push the narrative that we'll all be totally living in VR in a decade.

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