I didn’t find it that harsh. He was direct and took pains not to ridicule a thirteen year-old for making an entirely age-appropriate mistake in measuring the results. Instead, he asked the perfectly valid question of how this becomes news without critical thought.

In that, the critique seemed hopelessly ignorant of how the news works. Why should science fair projects be treated any differently than crime, the personal lives of celebrities, politics, or economics? News outlets publish first and ask questions later or not at all. They have gone to court to defend their right to publish things they know to be false.

How did a confused science project become international news? Why, the same way that almost any overnight sensation becomes international news, by being digestible, by being something people want to be true, by appealing to their preconceived biases.

A commenter pointed out that this is the value of a peer-review process. And indeed, this result was published without peer review. So who is the fool here? The journalist for publishing without review? Or the reader who knowingly accepts the result despite it being published without peer review and/or corroboration?

This is actually one of the things we consciously look for: companies that are turning businesses that didn't use to be software businesses into software businesses.

I live in central Japan's manufacturing hub. If you ever come visit me, and really want to return depressed, I'll arrange for us to take a tour of the company which produces most of the world's cell phone camera gaskets. (A little ring of rubber around the cell phone lens.) You very well might have one in the Japanese cellphone which came in the Chinese paper box and got stamped "Made in China" that you have in your pocket.

Every day, a couple hundred workers report to the factory. The most labor-intensive step in the process is taking a sheet of approximately 1,000 gaskets, manually removing them with a tweezer, inspecting them under a jeweler's loupe, and depositing the passes into the waiting outgoing package. When you fill it, it gets wheeled away for shipping. Your quota is 1,000 passed gaskets per hour, for which you are paid approximately 1,000 yen (at least, that was the pre-crash wage), or about $13 at today's prices.

When you say "We want our manufacturing jobs back", this is the kind of job you really want. It is easily the worst legal job I've heard of in a first-world nation. There's also practically a clock on the wall saying Time Until Robotic Arms Are Sensitive Enough To Do This Without Damaging An Unacceptable Portion Of Gaskets.

One reason that (pre-crash, anyhow) this neighborhood had a lot of immigrants is that the typical worker at this sort of factory 30~50 years ago was a Japanese woman in her twenties and that these days the job is a job Japanese women mostly won't do.

You can pick at Marc's words as much as you like, but having heard his visions back in '95 when Netscape was big, he's a big picture guy and is seeing the forest for the trees.

Consider the following:

- In this decade and the last, software engineer consistently ranks in the top ten best jobs

- During the financial crash, software engineers enjoyed the least turmoil and the quickest recovery compared to almost all other sectors

- Software is mission critical to almost every business in the world now, regardless of sector

- Our jobs tend to have the highest pay among the majority of jobs (again, top ten)

I'm with Marc. I'll double down on software right now...it's not going away.

You come up with only a single, high level reason for what could have thousands of reasons, and you seriously come up with one that is a detriment to our entire species. Draw from that conclusions on your capacity and will for logical thinking, sorry this has to be blunt. You are the modern day crusader. You get an idea in your head with next to no logical reasons and then start to proselytize everyone around you.

I'll give you another just as likely reason for past societal collapses (frankly, a lot likelier reason), and you can then fill in more if you are able. In times of peace, leaders have no dire motivation to mold their citizens into specific paths that are catalyst for military purposes. This leads to societes that are directionless. Historically, only military societies prevailed because they had direction and motivation to improve. However, what's so bad about being directionless? What exactly causes the downfall of "peaceful" (=actually just directionless) societies? We have to dig a little deeper. You jumped the gun and proclaimed it was peace itself that was doing the damage. That sounds ridiculous doesn't it? Peace itself has millions of little and big effects on society. Among these effects is the loss of need for children, therefore inevitably marriage laws get relaxed. Humans want to have sex a lot and with many other people, and marriage gets in the way of that. In peaceful times we have seen a gradual destruction of marital laws. This leads to marriages which can be formed and destroyed at the whim of any person, and in our society today, it's even worse because women are considerably favored in the break-up. This leads to people being very cautious to form deep bonds, and this ultimately leads to a weaker society, a society devoid of the ultimate motivation for every human being: Providing and protecting your family. It's like taking away one of the primary engines of a spaceship. There is still other engines that powers it: Need for food. Need for sex. However the strongest one, the motivation to protect your own children is gone. Because there are no children, because there are no marriages, because marriages are nowadays too fast and detrimental for male parties. What we need, is actual equality between the genders.