Read the print version of the article in one page:
http://www.infoworld.com/print/161969

Betelgeuse has a declination of 7 24.5' which barely varies at all, meaning it's visible from the North Pole all the way down to 75 South of the equator at least at one point during any 24 hour period. Most populated areas will get to see it at least 30 degrees above the horizon (the closer you are to 7 North, the higher up in the sky you'll see it, and the longer it will be visible each day).

So if it happens, you can watch it at home unless you live on Antarctica. If you have preferences as to seeing it at sunset, midnight, sunrise or midday, you might need to travel East or West.

Not really. Many goods have a density higher than that of seawater. The addition of extra fresh water from melting ice caps will help reduce the density of seawater. This will increase the range of products that can be thrown overboard to be delivered to underwater wastelands.

Also, higher sea levels will make it easier for bigger ships to sail right into the heart of sunken cities. This will further increase the efficiency of shipping, and reduce the need for secondary transport systems.

Now please, stop crashing the "glass half full"-party.

I love how some people can be so determined in saying humanity has hardly any impact on our planet. Consider the changes in human lifestyle over the last 100 years. Consider population growth. Consider consumption or natural resources. Consider how much of the Earth is changed by human development. Consider the combined effect of those, and then tell me it's a good idea to keep doing what we're doing.

It feels to me like some people are giving in to the fact that we did in fact evolve from monkeys, and they've found another noble cause to hang on to.

How can you be so sure that there is little we can do to stop it? The fact that we can't prove that we're responsible for global warming doesn't prove that we're not. And if you do a proper risk assessment, like this guy does in his series of videos that are very much worth viewing despite his silly hats, you'll find that the smart thing to do is to try and do something about it.

Your line of thought sounds like "the Earth is going to hell but we might not be responsible so let's just see where this goes". Consider the possibility that we are responsible, and/or (they don't even have to be connected) the possibility that we can do something about it.

Also, much shorter shipping routes from China and Japan to the U.S. East Coast and Europe.

As long as you're not the one doing the converting, someone will try to squeeze you for another joule.

It is a valid thought experiment, though. It raises some interesting questions. I think the main danger would be the practical application of fusion power. In your economy of energy credits, fusion power would cause hyperinflation and crash the worldwide economy. In the world as we know it, it would probably only crash the oil and gas markets, which have no real long term future anyway.

Trading 2kW for 1kW or less is being done on a massive scale everywhere in the world. Thermal power stations convert heat to electrical energy with an efficiency of 33-50%, meaning they're trading 2kW of heat for (at best) 1kW of electrical energy.

Side note: you should be talking about either watt-hours or joules as a unit of energy. Watt is a unit of power, or energy per unit of time.

Let all those kids know the book is in the public domain and they can legally download the original version with the bad words and sex scenes in it.

In case you're wondering, mentioning the sex scenes is to make sure they'll actually read the book.

What do you mean by 'unnoticed assumptions'?
I think statistical assumptions are well known.
If they come up with a simple univariate linear model, you know there are the Gauss-Markov assumptions and the linearity assumption.
And there are also ways to check if the assumptions are correct or not; and if not, there are corrections.

I agree with the post and there are two reasons for bad statistics: being lazy/dumb and money.
Here in Belgium, research facilities (from a university) are paid on certain grounds.
One of them is the number of publications in your facililty: the more publications, the more money.
They feel the pressure and it's obvious that the quality of research is going down.
There are some journals which aren't very attentive to the statistics, so they publish what other journals wouldn't.

But more and more researchers are seeing what is happening, so in the next five or ten years, I think it's going to change.
There is an equilibrium and soon, it will turn over to the other side.
Research will be scientific again, if they figure out a way how to fund researchers appropriate

(I am only speaking for psychology, I don't know anything about other domains.)

Tunneling really isn't that hard in most places. All you need is a deep hole on each side to assemble tunnel boring machines. You might run into problems with pipelines, wires and other tunnels, but you can always go deeper.