Brad DeLong goes through the policies put forward by Romney during his campaign and shows that whether the nation had elected a center-left (Obama) or center-right (Romney) President, the outcomes would have been pretty close:

President Romney vs. President Obama: On global warming, Romney would have abandoned economists' preferred Pigovian carbon tax for the complicated, corporatist and business-friendlier approach of a cap-and-trade system. But he would have been no more successful than Obama in assembling a Senate coalition to achieve anything.


On healthcare, Romney would have taken his signature Massachusetts health care reform and expanded it nationwide: we would have RomneyCare. But that is precisely what we do have.

To be honest, this is one of the coolest thing to come around in recent years. Imagine, encoding all your hi-def video content in the DNA of E. Coli:

Unhackable data in a box of bacteria: Future of InfoSec?: According to an AFP report, the U.S. national archives take up more than 500 miles of shelves, but one gram of bacteria used for storing data could hold the same amount of information as 450 hard drives with 2,000 gigabytes (2 TB) each of storage capacity.

In yet another attempt to be bipartisan and show that he is not, in fact, a socialist, President Obama is going to call for a 5-year spending freeze on discretionary spending. Because that's going so well for Britain, right?
Obama to Call for Five-Year U.S. Federal Spending Freeze: Obama plans to offer the freeze in his annual State of the Union address to Congress, Melody Barnes, director of the president’s domestic policy council, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. It would extend a three-year freeze Obama proposed last year by an additional two years. He also will endorse a proposal by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to cut $78 billion from the Pentagon budget over five years, Barnes said.

It appears home prices are back on the downwards slope yet again. Maybe our politicians should reconsider their plans for austerity?
U.S. home prices slide into 'double dip': The widely followed Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller Index, which tracks the real estate market in 20 major U.S. cities, showed that prices dropped 1.6% in November from the same month a year earlier, the second consecutive year-over-year decline. What's more, the index fell 1% in November from October, marking the fourth consecutive monthly decline.

While it's quite easy to mock the lack of credibility on Fox News, Jon Stewart shows time and again that his staff is the best at finding the hypocrisy spewed by the network. This time, Jon responds to a claim that Fox News doesn't liken Democrats to Nazis: 
Jon Stewart Calls Out Fox News' Nazi Hypocrisy (VIDEO): But he didn't stop there. Watch the rest of the clip to see Jon Stewart find more than just unfair Nazi comparisons on Fox News, but an instance of such name-calling within the same 24 hours of Megyn Kelly's comment, a Fox News pundit making the same Joseph Goebbels comparison as Steve Cohen, Fox News President Roger Ailes calling someone Hitler, and another Nazi remark on Megyn Kelly's own show.

A new study in Energy Policy states that it's possible for the world to move to 100% renewable energy. I think the fact that it could happen is fairly obvious. But if you look at those numbers, I just think there's no way people will be willing to spend the money needed to transition to such an environment. See what you think:
100 Percent Renewable Energy Achievable By 2030: Study: What exactly are these measures? According to PhysOrg, over 80 percent of our world's energy supply currently comes from fossil fuels. We would need to build approximately four million wind turbines, nearly 2 billion solar photovoltaic systems, and about 90,000 solar power plants. The 5 MW wind turbines needed are up to three times the capacity of most of our current wind turbines. Doable? Perhaps. Formidable? Most certainly.

So I knew that Android phones were using the latest technology, but I never thought they'd be used for this:


SSTL using Android handsets to control satellites, conquer the final frontier: "Now, Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) is looking to launch a satellite into orbit and use a 'droid -- much smaller than the Astromech variety -- to control said satellite. SSTL, who is helping build Galileo (and is acutely aware of its cost, no doubt), views smartphones as a way to democratize access to space because they are far less expensive than purpose-built control systems. The company hasn't said which handset will be used in the satellite, but they chose Android because it allows engineers to easily modify the phone to do their bidding -- from controlling pulse plasma thrusters to handling the advanced guidance and navigation systems of the foot long satellite."

I think we can all agree (I say we because I assume that anyone reading this is at least mostly sane) that the members of the Westboro Baptist Church are batshit insane. So when members of the church arrived to protest at the premiere of his new film, Red State, at the Sundance Film Festival, Kevin Smith decided to fight them the only way they can be fighted: with signs that say things even more nonsensical than what the wackos themselves are saying.

Kevin Smith's Fake Auction for "Red State" at Sundance Reveals His Indie Rage: Now, cue the protesters: The parking lot was host to about 15 followers of Fred Phelps' Kansas-based Westside Baptist Church, who bore signs reading "No Peace for the Wicked" and "Fags Doom Nation." Fifteen minutes before the screening was to begin, they met counter-protestors in the form of Smith and his producers, toting signs that said, "I'm a Happy Jew" and "Dick Tastes Yummy."

The New York Times' resident Nobel laureate, poking some fun at those who suggest that we shouldn't do stimulus to alleviate the current financial downturn, despite the evidence of such policies' success:


The War on Demand: "It’s kind of shocking if you think about it. Here we have a huge, hard-won intellectual achievement, one that accounts very well for the world we actually see, and yet it’s being thrown away because it doesn’t go along with ideological preconceptions. Once that sort of thing starts, where does it stop? The next thing you know, the theory of evolution will get the same treatment. Oh, wait."