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This is the MotoCzysz E1PC. It is electric. It is almost certainly the most advanced motorcycle on the planet. And it is the future.

We told you moto-genius Michael Czysz — pronounced sizz — was building another contender for the TT Zero electric motorcycle race on the Isle of Man. But we caught up with him early in the build and he wasn’t providing details or pics. Now that the bike’s hit the track, Wes Siler of Hell For Leather has all the details on the MotoCzysz E1PC in a piece posted over at Popular Science.

This bike is bad-ass, no two ways about it. It has a custom-built 12.5-kilowatt-hour lithium polymer battery that can be swapped in seconds. The custom-built, oil-cooled motor generates 100 horsepower (continuous) and 250 pound-feet of torque. It all hangs from a custom frame. Of course, it’s got the usual top-shelf hardware. Ohlins. Brembo. You know the drill.

Czyzs and his crew in Portland, Oregon, were literally buttoning the bike up before the first practice session on the Isle of Man, having just gotten the body panels through customs. No one had tested the bike before, but rider Mark Miller smoked the field during practice, finishing more than three minutes ahead of the competition. The bike hit a top speed of 140 mph and lapped the 37.7-mile course at an average speed of 94.66 mph.

For all the high-tech componentry, the E1PC is designed first and foremost as a motorcycle, so it’s meant to be hammered. Many bikes racing in the TTXGP series suffer ground-clearance issues when leaning into a turn, but the E1PC has no such trouble. Siler says riders accustomed to a conventional sportbike will feel right at home on the E1PC.

Take a close look at the pics. You’re looking at the future of motorcycling.

Photos: Amadeus Photography. More over at PopSci.

Today I went to a Get Motivated seminar. There were a number of speakers. Colin Powell spoke about meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev during the cold war, being the US Secretary of State and leading the greatest military in the world. Rudy Giuliani spoke about lowering crime rates in NYC and the effects of leading the city during September 11th and dealing with crisis. Mitt Romney spoke about helping fund Staples as a business start-up, as well as a few other business start-ups and managing the Winter Olympics in Utah. Apollo Ohno spoke about his olympic career. While John Walsh spoke about getting laws changed in congress to protect children and helping catch over 1000 fugitives during his TV shows 23 years on the air.

When it was finally Sarah Palin's chance to speak, being the last speaker of the day, she spoke about her high school basketball career for close to 30 minutes. Yes, I am being completely serious here.

Palin was originally scheduled to speak by satellite transmission but she surprised everyone at the end by actually showing up in person. I live in the most conservative state in the Union, Utah. She started off her speech trying to relate to the crowd. The event was held at Energy Solutions Arena, the home of the Utah Jazz. She spent five minutes telling us about how great it was that she was speaking in our basketball arena and the ties that the state of Alaska has with the Utah Jazz. Carlos Boozer, a Jazz player, grew up in Alaska. John Stockton's wife was from Alaska, Karl Malone likes to fish in Alaska and she claims to have done a 7th grade book report on "Pistol" Pete Marovich.

While most of the other speakers were able to walk around the stage talking as they moved about, she stayed at the podium that was set up for her. She was the only speaker to use a podium and she appeared to be reading her speech most of the time. At times she was reading it word for word, as her eyes did not leave the paper and she would correct herself, when she mis-pronounced something.

While I was trying to figure out where her Utah Jazz and Alaska analogy was going, she then started to talk about the great basketball coach, John Wooden. She started to quote a number of his famous sayings. I was not aware that she was on her small high school's basketball team. She told us how John Wooden's philosophies and coaching skills, shaped her into who she was today and that they were some of the most influential and driving forces in her life today. She not only quoted him but she also went through his pyramid of success. I thought this was odd, as most of the other speakers were talking about their own philosophies and what they had learned in their life to shape them into who they were. She was using someone elses material.

During her teams playoff run, she had hurt her knee. She was devastated that she could not play in a few of the playoff games and she let her coach know that if the team did make it to the championships game, she was going to play no matter what. She did not want to waste all of her practice time and effort that she put into playing basketball to be for nothing. She went into quite a bit of detail about her high school career, as she spoke on it for close to 30 minutes.

There are a lot of people that have played high school sports. High school basketball is something that I never did. However, there are a lot of high school athletes out there. When you are sharing a stage with amazing people, that have actually been able to accomplish some very amazing things in their life, you would hope that you could come up with more then just your high school basketball career. A career that you were injured in, sat on the bench over half the games in the playoffs but did get to play in the final game. Yet, you state this as being one of the most, if not the most, influential experiences of your whole life?

While none of the speakers dove into politics, more then just a small jab here or there, I did admire that Sarah Palin, did not take the time to bash the current administration. She did have quite a few intriguing quotes, that I'm sure her speech writer pulled from some other source. She is a woman of faith and did bring up god a number of times. She also had quite a bit of energy during her speech, even though as stated earlier, she did not leave the podium or look up from reading her speech for more then a few moments at a time.

I do not know how Sarah Palin, has been able to climb her way to the top of the conservative movement. While she does have a certain sense of charisma, her lack of experience, knowledge and expertise was very measurable. As stated earlier, seeing her on the stage with men that have accomplished so much and can actually say, they made a difference in their lives was a travesty. I do not know how she maintains such a following with so many conservatives in this country. She was very much out of her league today.

Maybe if things don't work out for her in her political career, she can always go back and be the coach of a small girls basketball team in Alaska. Where she can use her vast knowledge and expertise. So that she can not only help and inspire but she can also help the Republican party find their next charismatic nominee for the Executive Branch of the government.

Because sharing music is 14.5x more damaging than catastrophic, lifestyle-killing oil spills?

Independent estimates have the final cost of the BP spill at between 3 billion and 12 billion dollars. If Limewire has to pay, why doesn't BP?

And why isn't the entire American public as powerful a lobby as RIAA?

The record labels have told a federal judge LimeWire is liable for possibly “over a billion dollars” — the latest sign that the industry is seeking to annihilate the New York-based file sharing company.

The Recording Industry Association of America’s court filing Monday comes a week after the labels asked U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood to shutter LimeWire (.pdf). Weeks before, the New York judge ruled LimeWire’s users commit a “substantial amount of copyright infringement” (.pdf) and that the Lime Group, the company behind the application, “has not taken meaningful steps to mitigate infringement.”

“The amount of statutory damages awarded in this case easily could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars (if not over a billion dollars),” the RIAA wrote to Wood, in seeking a court order to freeze LimeWire’s assets (.pdf).

iPhone 4 has a pentaband antenna/chipset (although the Apple specs page only lists four, the FCC lists five bands), meaning it works not only on the GSM frequencies the earlier iPhones did, but it also now supports 900 MHz UMTS/HSDPA. This increases the utility of the phone by a great deal for many international users, many of whom will now have access to extended 3G networks for the first time with iPhone 4.

The antenna in iPhone 4 also means it's now a true "world phone" -- with access to GSM 3G over different frequencies, iPhone 4 should be able to connect to virtually any GSM 3G network in the world now (with the notable exception of T-Mobile in the US).

It's also likely iPhone 4 will have much better wireless reception than earlier iPhones because of its construction. According to the keynote, the stainless steel side casing functions as part of iPhone 4's antenna.

"This article attempts to produce a synthesis of what is known about sleep with a view to practical applications, especially in people who need top-quality sleep for their learning or creative achievements. Neurophysiology of sleep is an explosively growing branch of science. Many theories that are currently contested will soon be forgotten as a result of new findings. Consequently, this text is likely to grow old very quickly. Yet some basic truths about sleep are well-established, and practical conclusions can be drawn with the benefit to human creativity and intellectual accomplishment. In this text, I provide some links to research papers and popular-scientific articles that advocate disparate and contradictory theories. Please consult other sources to be certain you do not to get a one-sided view! This article includes some indications on how to use free running sleep in the treatment of insomnia, hypersomnia, advanced and delayed phase shift syndromes, and some other sleep disorders."