Guest Thinkers — December 12, 2010

One of these people is not like the other

Tyler Willis

The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

TechCrunch is 2 Legit 2 Quit!

The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

A man sits with his head resting on his hand, surrounded by crossed-out words like "nonsense," "babble," and "rubbish" in red text.

The Learning Curve

Stephen King’s most misused piece of writing advice

A thesaurus isn’t for finding fancy words; it’s a resource to help you keep your rhythm.

A silhouette of a person seated with blurred movement in the background and large text reading "KNOW YOUR EXIT" on the right.

Most people freeze in a crisis. Here’s why — and how to stop it

“The fear of panic has killed more people than most disasters themselves.”

▸

19 min

—

with

Amanda Ripley

Starts With A Bang

The red color of Mars is mere inches deep

The surface and atmosphere is colored by ferric oxides. Beneath a very thin layer, mere millimeters deep in places, it’s not red anymore.

A digital illustration of a brain, composed of circuit-like lines, appears against a black background filled with white dots resembling stars.

Neuropsych

The illusion of conscious AI

“Nobody expects a computer simulation of a hurricane to generate real wind and real rain,” writes neuroscientist Anil Seth.

Scatter plot with dark blue data points and black dashed elliptical contours centered on the origin, with axes labeled ξ (') horizontally and vertically—similar to plots used by astronomers in studies of the smallest galaxy ever discovered.

Starts With A Bang

Astronomers just found the smallest galaxy ever

With stars, gas, and dark matter, galaxies come in a great array of sizes. This new one, Ursa Major III/UNIONS 1, is the smallest by far.

Up Next

Guest Thinkers

Rives at TED

I have been religiously watching the TEDTalks series, a group of videos produced by TED. Overall I’ve been mostly impressed with the speakers, very cool stuff. Here’s an EXCELLENT spoken […]