Are the two mutually exclusive?

How about a vacuum tube that was formed in a loop passing through Earth and then back around the outside? It would need to be around 8000 miles in diameter (as a circle), since Wolfram Alpha says Earth's radius is 3957 miles. The tunnel would have a circumference somewhat over 25,000 miles.

The engineering is left as an exercise to the reader.

There are different ways of stating the problem.

1) "Technology is eliminating jobs! How will we cope with the unemployment?"

2) "Technology is increasing productivity! How will we distribute the gains?"

3) "Technology is reducing total workforce requirements! How will we reduce the work week?"

Each of these assumes a different fixed aspect of the economy. The first assumes that industrial capitalism will chug on, basically unchanged, while unemployment rises to unprecedented levels. History suggests this is unlikely.

The second assumes that productivity gains will continue without the incentive of paid work.

The third assumes that paid work will remain the only way of distributing productivity gains.

The rise of industrial capitalism saw enormous social upheaval. It is likely that the rise of total automation will produce something similar. We have no idea what that will be (I certainly don't) but it's important that we recognize that while not everything will change, everything could, and not confine our imaginary futures too narrowly. We're going to be wrong regardless (because our imaginations are terrible tools for knowing reality) but in this case we're more likely to fail by being too narrow in our view than too broad.

One common thread in science denial is post-modernism. The American Right is dominated by post-modernists at the moment, and the Left has been for decades.

By "post-modernists" I mean people who believe that objectivity is not just impossible but actually pernicious, that truth is a social construct, and that "different ways of knowing" are equally legitimate and culturally dependent.

This is in contrast to the scientific mindset that understands that while there is no view from nowhere there is also no view of nowhere, and works hard to see that place that exists independently of the knowing subject as clearly as possible. Pro-science people are Bayesians, so they know certainty is impossible (knowledge is uncertain; faith is certain, and also an epistemic error) and that Bayes' rule provides the only consistent way of updating our beliefs in the face of new evidence, so it doesn't matter what your ancestors or you pastor tells you, there is only one way of knowing.

I'd bet a lot of these "highly educated" anti-vaxxers are victims of post-modernism in this sense. It should be relatively easy to find out how well they know their Derrida, Laccan, Leotard and Foucoult compared to their more vaccination-friendly neighbours.

Clearly, we need a keyboard which constantly shifts the positions of the keys around randomly.

The odds aren't appreciably closer to zero, the enjoyment is the same or greater, there is no chance of disappointment, and the cost is zero.

If you invest the $104 a year you'd otherwise spend on lottery tickets then with interest at the end of 40 years (from age 20 to age 60) you will have accumulated about $9K, assuming 3.5% interest.

If it were so reliable and universal, Mr. Kurt Gödel wouldn't have had such a big argument with Mr. David Hilbert.

Just nitpicking, since we ARE talking about math as a whole, here. You didn't specify any little bit of it.

Yep, that was a fantastic shooter. Nothing out at the time (that I know of/played; someone will correct me here) really had interacting weapons like that. Turned it into a very fast-paced version of chess, plus you could lay traps in your area before a match started.

I think a better question is: why use a design requiring active cooling? Obviously, this only applies going forward.

Yes. I live approximately 35 miles downstream from an active plant. Wouldn't mind them building a new (emphasis on new: modern design, preferably a MSR) plant nearby either.

This is essentially the process for beer.

I would suggest that the argument here is weak because it collapses everything into a binary view: Science and the Rest_of_Us.

Indeed, we need to be able to count past two here. It's silly to view Science in a monolothic way that ignores time, competing views, vested interests, etc.

The issues raised here actually have more to do with the relative inability of folk to DIGEST information from Science, scientists and scientific studies than it really does with a lack of credibility on the part of Science and Scientists. Very often any benefit or harm discovered in a study is altogether minor. And yet, folk latch on to something being either good or bad (that inability to count past two again).

Furthermore, it is sheer folly to ignore the way the general population feeds information back into itself and turns things into trends and fads. Why blame the Scientists when the "crediblity problem" is often a factor of marketing forces, popular science (both facile journalism and self-help books), fads, etc.?

There are two things to say about this:

1) Diet and fitness are hard problems because humans evolved as opportunistic hunter-gatherer-scavengers, so we are moderately well adapted to almost any imaginable lifestyle. When the optimum is broad and shallow (which it necessarily is, especially for diet, unless you are an evolution denialist) it is easy to wander around in the noise.

This is made worse by snake-oil salespeople who are dedicated to the idea that the optimum is narrow and deep, and they can sell you its precise location. They take any minor wobble that scientists identify--which based on evolution is almost certainly noise--and declare it the One True Location of Perfect Health.

2) The alternative is stories. Science fails to get traction with the public because it lacks narrative, which is an idea I explore in a lot more depth here: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-...

If I read the article (or even the summary) correctly, this is about updating the known_hosts file, not authorized_keys. So, even with this enabled, this only affects the "The hostkey has changed" warning message, not who can log in with which keys. Although I am a tad uneasy about automatic key updates, this seems to be fairly safe, and it makes it so much easier to change a hostkey, without bothering all the users of a system.

It's like having a super-long prehensile finger with a tongue at the end. You do the math.