Minnesota's recount is a long way from over. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to predict the winner, I would tell you to shoot me.

FiveThirtyEight.com: Politics Done Right: Minnesota May Be Heading Toward Resolution -- In Court

Poised as the world's leading supplier of green tea, ITO EN is dedicated to the promotion of the fine taste, traditions, and benefits of green tea.

HFCS ruined America! Sencha shot FTW!

Ito En

Despite this, Uncle Sam and taxpayers remain reluctant to rescue the automakers. Many people say Detroit has no one but itself to blame for its woes, so we ought not throw good money after bad. It's easy to see why they'd think that way. After all, the Big Three have rarely missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Here are five examples where American automakers completely dropped the ball.

Detroit Rarely Misses a Chance to Miss a Chance | Autopia from Wired.com

The Big Three were late to the hybrid party, but they're finally getting into the swing of things with cars like the 38 39-mpg Ford Fusion Hybrid, a car that should make Toyota nervous and might just help Ford escape the apocalypse in Detroit.

The Fusion Hybrid Is Ford's Escape Route | Autopia from Wired.com

Bob Briscoe, in the latest IEEE Spectrum:

There’s a profound flaw in the protocol that governs how people share the Internet’s capacity.

A Fairer, Faster Internet Protocol

NASA has pushed back the launching of its next ambitious Mars mission by two years because of lengthening delays and lingering technical issues, agency officials announced Thursday.

NASA Delays Next Mars Rover Mission - NYTimes.com

A CANCER is overtaking our space agency: the routine acquiescence to immense cost increases in projects. Unmistakable new indications of this illness surfaced last month with NASA’s decision to spend at least $100 million more on its poorly-managed, now-over-$2 billion Mars Science Laboratory. This decision to go forward with the project, a robotic rover, was made even though it has tripled in cost since its inception, it is behind schedule, there is no firm estimate of the final cost, and NASA hasn’t disclosed the collateral damage inflicted on other programs and activities that depend on NASA’s limited science budget.

Former Associate NASA Administrator Alan Stern delivered this scathing criticism of NASA spending/budget practices on the op-ed page of NYT 2 weeks ago. NASA = pork.

Op-Ed Contributor - NASA’s Black Hole Budgets - NYTimes.com

CNN, the Cable News Network, announced yesterday that it will cut its entire science, technology, and environment news staff, including Miles O’Brien, its chief technology and environment correspondent, as well as six executive producers. Mediabistro’s TVNewser broke the story.

CNN Cuts Entire Science, Tech Team : CJR:

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's NASA transition team is asking U.S. space agency officials to quantify how much money could be saved by canceling the Ares 1 rocket and scaling back the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle next year.

YES! Kill the stick!

SPACE.com -- Obama to Review Costs of Shuttle Replacement Vehicle

The State of Hawaii and the Hawaiian Electric Company on Tuesday endorsed an effort to build an alternative transportation system based on electric vehicles with swappable batteries and an “intelligent” battery recharging network.

The plan, the brainchild of the former Silicon Valley software executive Shai Agassi, is an effort to overcome the major hurdles to electric cars — slow battery recharging and limited availability.

By using existing electric car technologies, coupled with an Internet-connected web of tens of thousands of recharging stations, he thinks his company, Better Place L.L.C. of Palo Alto, Calif., will make all-electric vehicles feasible.

Better Place was written up in Wired a few months back... this is definitely an interesting approach.

Hawaii Endorses Plan for Electric Cars - NYTimes.com