Guest Thinkers — February 22, 2011

TED 2007: Icons, Geniuses, Mavericks

Over the past week, the official TED Blog has provided great coverage of the goings-on at TED 2007 in California, which this year has the tagline of “Icons. Geniuses. Mavericks.” The event has already received a torrent of publicity, from the likes of CBS News, Business Week and the New York Times, which are positioning the event as the U.S. equivalent of Davos. The event is also being covered by a team of about 10-15 bloggers, including Diego Rodriguez of Metacool, giving TED 2007 a distinctive online voice as well. Anyway, be sure to check out the snippets from a great list of more than 50 speakers, including Philippe Starck, physics Nobel prize winner Murray Gell-Mann, venture capitalist John Doerr, entrepreneur Richard Branson, former U.S. President Bill Clinton and former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold.

[image: The crowd at TED 2007]

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

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