What it says is "Sign in with Facebook Connect or enter your info below to comment" and then there are boxes for name, email, and URL, just like the comments here. I don't see any indication that a Facebook account is required.

What I did discover is that Battelle's site uses that infuriating Javascript thing that forces the URL of the post into anything you copy and paste. Man, I hate that.

I don't see the facebook gubbins at all, although I see most commentators have that "f" by their names. What does stop me commenting is "Let us know that you're human:" - apparently I'm not human, just because my audio-visual abilities are limited.

Yes, you're right, it's allowing non-Facebook comments today. That's news to me. I thought it was not doing so at least as of yesterday, though I could have missed the change when I checked. It definitely didn't allow non-Facebook comments recently.

You can see I likely wasn't hallucinating since the comments are all FaceBbok sign-ins in e.g. the previous blog entry.

I had mentioned this to Zittrain earlier. Could it be someone actually cared?