Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, workin' it out Saturday at Verizon Arena in North Little Rock, where Tom Petty performed in Arkansas for the first time.

What you can say? It doesn’t get much better than Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, live at Verizon Arena in North Little Rock for his first-ever Arkansas show. Two hours of bliss. My InArkansas.com review right here.

Superfuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future, by Richard Martin

Speaking of alternative energy.

It was my pleasure to moderate a session Saturday on Richard Martin’s forthcoming book, “Superfuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future,” at this year’s Arkansas Literary Festival.

The book, which came out of Martin’s 2009 Wired article, looks at thorium, a radioactive element and alternative fuel that produces zero nuclear waste, is cheaper than coal, more abundant than uranium and can’t be weaponized.

Despite all its benefits and advantages over other forms energy, thorium has been largely forsaken by the American energy industry. Martin explores the long history of thorium, including the efforts of Alvin Weinberg, a scientist on the Manhattan Project and advocate of thorium reactors. And he looks at how countries like China and India are positioning themselves as future leaders of thorium power, and how small groups of innovators and investors in the United States are working to develop thorium power as a viable alternative to other more costly and dangerous forms of energy.

Martin, a former Arkansas Times editor who grew up in Little Rock, has been reporting on energy and technology for 20 years. Despite subject matter that many find intimating, he delivers a brief, colorful and yet comprehensive narrative that readers with even a passing interest in energy policy will find fascinating. Martin’s book makes complex issues and history relatable. And the discussion of the United States’ energy independence — here, presented with a very real, possible solution to some of our biggest questions — has never been more relevant.

I lent some comments to a quick hit on last night’s Today THV’s newscasts about how the wind industry is positioned in Arkansas. The hook?

The U.S. Wind Industry’s Annual Market Report list Arkansas as one of the top states attracting major wind energy manufactures. …

According to the Natural Resource Defense Council, Arkansas generates nearly half its electricity from coal-fired power plants, and most of the remainder from nuclear and natural gas.

The council also ranks Arkansas 27 out of of 50 states for wind power potential.

I think the bottom line is that while we’ve seen setbacks in our growing wind industry — delays by Mitsubishi in Fort Smith and Polymarin in Little Rock — we remain well-position to take advantage of an industry that’s growing as we look more and more to alternative sources of power.

Tonight

I’m back on AETN’s “Arkansas Week” at 8 p.m. tonight. But you can watch the full episode right now right here.

On the agenda: that surprising state Supreme Court ruling on high school teachers and sex with students, more intrigue at the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery, the futility of establishing an Obama campaign headquarters in Arkansas, and host Steve Barnes’ touching tribute to AETN advocate Jane Krutz, who died this week.

Google+

It a long read but totally worth it. It’s a good assessment of where the search giant is these days and how (and why) it got there:

This explains why Google has been driving privacy advocates crazy and polluting its search results. It explains why now, on the Google homepage, there’s a big ugly black bar across the top that reminds you of all its properties. It explains the glaring red box with the meaningless numbers that so desperately begs you to come see what’s happening in its anti-social network. It explains why Google is being a bully. It explains why Google broke search: Because to remain relevant it has to give real-world answers.

… Real-world answers like the kind folks are getting minute-by-minute on sites like Twitter and Facebook and the universe of smartphone apps that are closed off from Google’s webcrawlers.

That means more of your data hidden from Google’s servers, which need that data to show you relevant advertising — the core of its business.

So if you didn’t know it already, there’s a huge battle going by some very powerful companies that desperately want to know everything about you. Because on Google and Facebook, you are the product.

Well, it’s no weatherman (not) getting punched in the face. But it’s a shade more harrowing, when WREG-TV, Channel 3, TV reporter April Thompson and her cameraman find themselves in Joiner, Ark., (Mississippi County) investigating a suspicious death, and happening upon a decidedly unfriendly local. According to Thompson:

We do what we always do in these cases, we go out to find the details. But what we found was an angry man with a gun.

That man, Brandon Odom, could now face an aggravated assault charge, a class D felony, according to police.

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Video: WREG’s April Thompson has a gun pulled on her

I stopped by Today’s THV last night to talk about Mark Friedman’s story on Wal-Mart’s social media plans, available in this week’s edition of Arkansas Business.

Friedman surveys Wal-Mart’s recent social media and e-commerce acquisitions — Kosmix, Yihaodian, Newput — and Facebook strategy and reports that this could be the beginning to a big push by the world’s largest retailer to better leverage the social web to drive online sales.

Above, my live hit this morning on “Today’s THV This Morning” ahead of today’s third-generation iPad launch. Drinking game: Every time someone says “device,” take a shot! And that white earbud in my ear? That was my audio link to the studio today, connected to an iPhone in my back pocket.

Today was obviously my first look at the new iPad, and the display really is all it’s cracked up to be: super high-res, vibrant colors, near-imperceptible pixels. It’s also seems every bit as speedy as you’ve heard, and definitely leaps and bounds over my first-generation iPad. And in terms of network speed, Verizon’s 4G LTE connection should really shine on the iPad. Web pages rendered quickly, and video loaded almost instantly. Oh, and video and picture quality? Off the charts, owing, again, to that gorgeous display.

There were no lines at the Midtown Little Rock Verizon store we were at, at least when I was there from roughly 6-7 this morning. But it looks as if demand will be strong (pre-orders from Apple are already sold-out).

Will I upgrade? It depends. On paper, I probably should. I use my first-generation device heavily every day. But I’m also still really happy with it and its performance (while it had gotten a bit crashy lately, stability seems to have improved after the OS 5.1 refresh), and it’s hard for me to give up on something before it’s outlived its usefulness.

But if you’re a first-time buyer, or if you’re a heavy ebook reader who wants improved resolution, it’s a no-brainer. This “device” will serve you well.

ArkansasBusiness.com, on iPad

Meanwhile, looking at ArkansasBusiness.com on the new iPad, I get what folks like Josh Topolsky are saying about how unforgiving the display can be to websites that aren’t optimized for such a high resolution.

The headers for our main menu, in fact, seem blurry, and look even worse if you zoom in, something we’ll definitely keep in mind as we redesign our site this year.

I think we’ll see a lot of web designers — and obviously app designers — rethinking their designs in light of a such a high-res display.

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Stephen Hackett, who writes 512 Pixels up the road in Memphis, viewed the new iPad at a new Verizon store. You can get his thoughts on Verizon 4G LTE, the iPad’s hotspot capability on Verizon and competing Android devices right here.

The New iPad

The embargo fell last night. With the new iPad (iPad 3) devices on their way to stores — and the hands of those who pre-ordered — it’s time to take a look at the reviews:

Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal/AllThingsD:

I’ve been testing the new iPad, and despite these trade-offs, its key improvements strengthen its position as the best tablet on the market. Apple hasn’t totally revamped the iPad or added loads of new features. But it has improved it significantly, at the same price.

It has the most spectacular display I have ever seen in a mobile device.

John Gruber, Daring Fireball:

Reading on the big retina display is pure joy. Going back to the iPad 2 after reading for a few hours on the iPad 3 is jarring. With bigger pixels, anti-aliased text looks blurry; with smaller pixels, anti-aliased text looks good; but with really small pixels like these, anti-aliased text looks impossibly good — and what you thought looked pretty good before (like text rendered on older iPads) now looks blurry.

Josh Topolsky, The Verge:

Yes, this display is outrageous. It’s stunning. It’s incredible. I’m not being hyperbolic or exaggerative when I say it is easily the most beautiful computer display I have ever looked at. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that you hold this in your hands, or maybe it’s the technology that Apple is utilizing, or maybe it’s the responsiveness of iOS — but there’s something almost bizarre about how good this screen is. After the launch event, I described the screen as “surreal,” and I still think that’s a pretty good fit.

(Bonus: His Apple TV review.)

David Pogue, The New York Times:

My Verizon test unit got download speeds ranging from 6 to 29 megabits a second in San Francisco, Boston and New York — in many cases, faster than home cable-modem service. According to tests by PC Magazine and others, AT&T’s 4G network is smaller, but often faster. No doubt about it: life begins at 4G.

Now, 4G is a notorious battery hog. It scarfs down electricity like a football team at a hot dog eating contest.

Apple, however, was determined to keep the iPad’s battery life unchanged from the last model: nine to 10 hours on a charge. In my all-day nonstop-usage test, it did manage nine hours.

MG Siegler, TechCrunch:

The most notable of these is the LTE functionality. Put simply: it’s fast. Really fast. Faster-than-my-WiFi fast.

Yesterday, I clocked the new iPad using LTE at over 40 mbps down and 20 up on Verizon’s network. That’s about twice as fast as my current home cable broadband. For good measure, I tethered the new iPad to my iPhone 4S to compare it to Verizon’s 3G speeds. It’s about 40x faster for downloading.

Jason Snell, MacWorld:

The new iPad is also heavier than the iPad 2. The new model weighs either 652 grams (1.44 pounds) for the Wi-Fi-only model or 662 grams (1.46 pounds) for the 4G model. In contrast, the Wi-Fi iPad 2 weighed 601 grams (1.33 pounds) while the AT&T model of the 3G-equipped iPad 2 was 613 grams (1.35 pounds). So your standard Wi-Fi iPad has put on about 50 grams or a tenth of a pound. It’s a small weight gain, but I can’t call it imperceptible. The first time I picked up the third-generation iPad, I could tell that it was heavier.

What does this increased weight mean in practice? Probably not very much.

Craig O’Neill and I discussing some of the more positive news, locally and nationally, in our slow economic recovery.

One thing I wish I had noted — not to be a killjoy but just to keep some perspective — is that we’re not out of the woods yet in terms of big layoffs. We just had a big announcement last week in Jonesboro, where the state’s largest printing operation is shutting down this year, and of course we’re about to have 1,000 workers come on the market this summer, when Whirlpool finally mothballs its refrigerator plant in Fort Smith.

There’s lots of good signs, and the numbers are certainly moving in the right direction, but we’re by no means out of the woods yet.