If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?

— Lily Tomlin

Environmentalist Peter Sinclair is beginning a new series of videos titled “Renewable Energy Solution of the Month,” and the first episode deals with some interesting possibilities for electric cars you may not have previously considered.

Here’s an interesting article at MacWorld on the Apple A4 microprocessor, the CPU for the iPad and the first Apple-branded system-on-a-chip: Apple inside: the significance of the iPad’s A4 chip.

With the A4, Apple still maintains its long-standing relationship with ARM while delivering on performance, with a design that no competitor can use in its own products. More to the point, the A4 puts a very critical part of Apple’s iPad under its very own control. And that move is unprecedented.

Going back to the earliest days of the Mac, Apple chose Motorola’s 68k series of chips to power its Macs because they offered better performance than Intel’s equivalent technology. In the early ’90s, the company migrated its Macs to the PowerPC architecture when Motorola couldn’t deliver a 68k processor as fast and as energy efficient as Intel’s Pentium series. Then, when the major vendors behind the PowerPC couldn’t keep pace with Intel’s Pentium IV and AMD’s Athlon series, Apple switched its Macs once more—this time to Intel’s own Core series.

Today, Macs remain beholden to Intel’s specifications. If Intel can’t keep pace, Apple will have to find yet another vendor for CPUs. But now, with the iPad’s A4, Apple has demonstrated a new option: It has the ability to take existing designs and repurpose them to give its own products better performance than the competition.

As the Super Bowl draws to its inevitable end (who didn’t like the dramatic hamster ad? or the weird giant toys driving an Acura or whatever it was?), here’s an open thread…

UPDATE at 2/7/10 7:04:49 pm:

Breaking news: a major factor in New Orleans’ win tonight — Bobby Jindal held an exorcism in the locker room right before the game.

A live version from Japan in 1995 of “Here To Stay,” from the Pat Matheny Group’s 1994 masterpiece, We Live Here. (The iTunes Store has this essential jazz album too.)

Embattled climate scientist Phil Jones talks to the Times Online: The leak was bad. Then came the death threats - Times Online.

At the worst possible time, in the days immediately before the Copenhagen climate summit in December, it enabled sceptics across the globe to claim that climate science was fatally flawed and its practitioners a shifty gang who twisted the facts to suit their agenda and shut out anyone who disagreed with them.

Jones insists that is not the way it was, but concedes it was the way it may have looked. He now accepts that he did not treat the FoI requests as seriously as he should have done. “I regret that I did not deal with them in the right way,” he told The Sunday Times. “In a way, I misjudged the situation.”

But he pleads provocation. Last year in July alone the unit received 60 FoI requests from across the world. With a staff of only 13 to cope with them, the demands were accumulating faster than they could be dealt with. “According to the rules,” says Jones, “you have to do 18 hours’ work on each one before you’re allowed to turn it down.” It meant that the scientists would have had a lot of their time diverted from research.

A further irritation was that most of the data was available online, making the FoI requests, in Jones’s view, needless and a vexatious waste of his time. In the circumstances, he says, he thought it reasonable to refer the applicants to the website of the Historical Climatology Network in the US.

He also suspected that the CRU was the target of a co-ordinated attempt to interfere with its work — a suspicion that hardened into certainty when, over a matter of days, it received 40 similar FoI requests. Each applicant asked for data from five different countries, 200 in all, which would have been a daunting task even for someone with nothing else to do. It was clear to Jones that the attack originated from an old adversary, the sceptical website Climate Audit, run by Steve McIntyre, a former minerals prospector and arch climate sceptic.

“We were clearly being targeted,” says Jones. “Only 22% of the FoI enquiries were identifiably from within the UK, 39% were from abroad and 39% were untraceable.” What irked him was that the foreign applicants would all have had sources closer to hand in their own countries.

“I think they just wanted to waste our time,” he says. “They wanted to slow us down.”

It was pure irritation, he says, that provoked him and others to write the notorious emails apparently conspiring to destroy or withhold data. “It was just frustration. I thought the requests were just distractions. It was taking us away from our day jobs. It was written in anger.”

But he insists that no data were destroyed. “We have no data to delete. It comes to us from institutions around the world. We interpret data. We don’t create or collect it. It’s all available from other sources.”

If the leak itself was bad, the aftermath was the stuff of nightmares. Even now, weeks later, Jones seems rigid with shock. “There were death threats,” he says. “People said I should go and kill myself. They said they knew where I lived.” Two more death threats came last week after the deputy information commissioner delivered his verdict, making more work for Norfolk police, who are already investigating the theft of the emails.

Sarah Palin, who quit her elected office as Governor of Alaska in the middle of her term, now says she’s considering running for President in 2012.

“I would, I would if I believe that is the right thing to do for our country and the Palin family. Certainly I would do so,” she told “Fox News Sunday,” in an interview that was taped before she addressed a Tea Party convention the night before. “I think that it would be absurd to not consider what it is that I could potentially do to help our country … . I won’t close a door that perhaps could be open for me in the future.”

In her interview with Fox News, she quoted … get ready for it … Pat Buchanan.

In her first Sunday show appearance, the 2008 vice-presidential candidate predicted that, if the election were held today, President Barack Obama would actually lose the office he won just a year-and-a-half ago. But — citing a column written by Pat Buchanan — she left open the possibility that his fates could change, particularly (she seemed to wish) if a major attack were to be launched against Iran.

And she topped it off by defending Rush Limbaugh’s use of the word “retard,” (with the patented “It’s satire!” gambit), reversing the criticism issued by one of her aides just a few days ago.

“They are kooks, so I agree with Rush Limbaugh,” she said, when read a quote of Limbaugh calling liberal groups “retards.” “Rush Limbaugh was using satire … . I didn’t hear Rush Limbaugh calling a group of people whom he did not agree with ‘f-ing retards,’ and we did know that Rahm Emanuel, as has been reported, did say that. There is a big difference there.”

But remember — no teleprompter! [twinkle]

Among the other right wing talking points Sarah Palin hammered in her $100,000 Tea Party Convention speech: that Obama uses a teleprompter.

I know. The horror. Only a commie would use such an infernal device, right? Why, I’ll betcha that no politician ever used one before Obama was elected!

Palin can proudly say she’s teleprompter-free, though. Because she just writes her crib notes on the palm of her hand with a ball point pen.

But no teleprompter! [winkies]