The Transmeta Crusoe (VLIW with software translation) was nothing like the Pentium M which was a derivative of the P6. The Pentium M did add some cleverness in fusing some of its hardware translated micro-ops but that's not terribly related to what Transmeta were doing.
You may be misremembering the patent lawsuit Transmeta filed against Intel, long after the Pentium M had been released and Crusoe had failed commercially, basically as an alternative monetisation strategy. Intel did end up paying them to go away, but their IP was not "rolled into" Pentium M any more than Eolas's was into Internet Explorer.
Ridley has a hidden agenda here - he's a global warming denier and he emphasizes confirmation bias to explain how all the climate scientists got it wrong (unlike him).
The cliche he derides that "scientists love proving themselves wrong" is a cliche of the climate debate to argue that the whole field of climate science is unlikely to be rotten (personally I think the point is more that scientists love proving their colleagues wrong).
There's a endnote identifying the article as "The first of three columns on the topic of confirmation bias" so I wonder if he'll do a big reveal of AGW-denial or if he's just trying to sow subtle seeds of doubt in the background.
You may be misremembering the patent lawsuit Transmeta filed against Intel, long after the Pentium M had been released and Crusoe had failed commercially, basically as an alternative monetisation strategy. Intel did end up paying them to go away, but their IP was not "rolled into" Pentium M any more than Eolas's was into Internet Explorer.