Wow, the new Guatemala City sinkhole is incredible.

How cool is this?: NYC’s public basketball hoops are handmade by blacksmiths.

Our Fix-It Faith and the Oil Spill:

Americans have long had an unswerving belief that technology will save us — it is the cavalry coming over the hill, just as we are about to lose the battle. And yet, as Americans watched scientists struggle to plug the undersea well over the past month, it became apparent that our great belief in technology was perhaps misplaced.

“Americans have a lot of faith that over the long run technology will solve everything, a sense that somehow we’re going to find a way to fix it,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. He said Pew polling in 1999 — before the September 2001 terror attacks — found that 64 percent of Americans pessimistically believed that a terrorist attack on the United States probably or definitely would happen. But they were naïvely optimistic about the fruits of technology: 81 percent said there would be a cure for cancer, 76 percent said we would put men on Mars.

Sobering. Brings global warming to mind.

Mark Pilgrim’s sad, beautiful elegy for a 25-year friend.

Amelia and I have been racing each other through Exit Path. She crushes me.

A meeting of mathemagical tricksters:

Gary Foshee, a collector and designer of puzzles from Issaquah near Seattle walked to the lectern to present his talk. It consisted of the following three sentences: “I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability I have two boys?”

The event was the Gathering for Gardner earlier this year, a convention held every two years in Atlanta, Georgia, uniting mathematicians, magicians and puzzle enthusiasts. The audience was silent as they pondered the question.

“The first thing you think is ‘What has Tuesday got to do with it?'” said Foshee, deadpan. “Well, it has everything to do with it.” And then he stepped down from the stage.

I haven’t read the rest yet because I want to puzzle over it awhile longer. (via kottke)

Teetering on the edge of deleting my Facebook account, but it’s so damn hard. It is a lobster trap with your friends as bait, and I can’t resist the bait! The tension between hating Facebook and loving my friends (hooray for ambient awareness) puts me in a bit of a pickle. Here is the series of recent links that got me to teetering:

• Dan Yoder’s Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook seems like it’s pretty much the de facto voice of the current backlash.
• Why You Should Still Quit Facebook is Yoder’s followup.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation laid out a timeline of Facebook’s eroding privacy policy.
• Matt McKeon created a great interactive visualization (with Processing.js, very cool), The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook showing how Facebook’s default privacy settings have changed over time.
• Arvind Narayanan chipped in some good solid commentary.
• Finally, there’s the fact that I set “Interests” and “Things I Like” to “Friends Only,” but my “Likes and Interests” still show up on my public profile. No way to view that as anything but deceitful or incompetent on FB’s part.

That pretty much lays it out. If nothing else, this makes me feel old. What I really want is for the Diaspora guys to do a bang-up job, and have all my friends move to that.

P.S. It’s not so much that I’m concerned with my own privacy, I just really don’t want Facebook to get away with this epic bait-and-switch. They have no honor, and I hate supporting them (under their business plan, participation=support). But again, love my friends. Argh!

Roger Ebert: Why I Hate 3-D (and You Should Too). Amen, brother!

Lost an evening to this one: Cursed Treasure. Damn tower defense games get me every time. (via kottke)

Steven Strogatz wraps up his marvelous From Fish to Infinity math series with, appropriately, a piece on infinity, where he tackles a mind-bender: some infinities are bigger than others. So sorry to see this series end, but the columns will reappear with additional material in book form in 2012! Until then, here’s the whole collection:

• From Fish to Infinity (Jan. 31, 2010)
• Rock Groups (Feb. 7, 2010)
• The Enemy of My Enemy (Feb. 14, 2010)
• Division and Its Discontents (Feb. 21, 2010)
• The Joy of X (Feb. 28, 2010)
• Finding Your Roots (March 7, 2010)
• Square Dancing (March 14, 2010)
• Think Globally (March 21, 2010)
• Power Tools (March 28, 2010)
• Take It to the Limit (April 4, 2010)
• Change We Can Believe In (April 11, 2010)
• It Slices, It Dices (April 18, 2010)
• Chances Are (April 25, 2010)
• Group Think (May 2, 2010)
• The Hilbert Hotel (May 9, 2010)

Impossible to pick a favorite Louis CK standup routine, but his bit on turning 40 is way, way up there.

Impressive parkour video from Damien Walters. (via conditioning research)