I was looking at the Big Picture’s Dance Around the World photos, and was struck by the photo of Antoine Carabinier in the big wheel. I’ve seen German Wheel acts before, but never this, with all its finger-crushing potential. Googling quickly revealed that the apparatus is called the Cyr Wheel, named for inventor Daniel Cyr. Searching YouTube for “Cyr Wheel” turns up a mix of professional performances (here’s Antoine Carabinier in action, starting around 0:50, and here’s a performance by Balazs Foldvary, both impressive) and plenty of amateurs (the guy on the tennis court is a fast learner). Amateurs! Where do you even get a big metal wheel? There are quite a few leads in this thread, along with a surprisingly low reported quote of $200 to have one made and shipped (2006, from Vancouver). This post on WikiAnswers lists some manufacturers. Looks like fun! I’d get one if I had just a few more illusions about my coordination.

Jon Stewart: Unusually Large Snowstorm. Love that guy.

Nice to see some awesomeness out of Redmond: check this Bing Maps demo where they automatically meld Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos into their street view using Photosynth. (via waxy)

Anybody else remember Blip?

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories took one apart. I had one, and I can’t believe it was almost completely mechanical.

Happy to see I’m not the only one who hates the but look at all the snow “argument” against climate change.

Old Spice wins the award for best Super Bowl commercial this year, The Man Your Man Could Smell Like:

Love this powerful seatbelt commercial from the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership. (thx alec)

If Filmmakers Directed the Super Bowl. QT’s is the one I’d most want to watch.

Totally insane: we might be living in a giant cosmic hologram. Staggering. Read the whole thing. And I thought the discovery of the quantum physics underlying photosynthesis was mind-blowing.

Really looking forward to watching Steven Strogatz’s math series unfold:

Crazy as it sounds, over the next several weeks I’m going to try to do something close to that. I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.

So, let’s begin with pre-school…

He then cites a Sesame Street video. Good man.

P.S. If you want to subscribe to just Strogatz’s stuff, I couldn’t find a separate author feed at the NYT, so I created a Yahoo pipe of his posts.

Terry Pratchett is hoping he can die on his own terms:

And so I have vowed that rather than let Alzheimer’s take me, I would take it. I would live my life as ever to the full and die, before the disease mounted its last attack, in my own home, in a chair on the lawn, with a brandy in my hand to wash down whatever modern version of the Brompton Cocktail some helpful medic could supply. And with Thomas Tallis on my iPod, I would shake hands with Death.

I hope for his sake that he can. Everybody should be allowed to opt out early, stigma-free, legal-entanglement-free.

Richard Feynman on “why” (and magnetism, and why ice is slippery, and more). I could watch Feynman videos all day. (via kottke)