May links

[spoonless]

Body modification - Stelarc implants ear in arm:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/16/stelarc_posthumanist.html

The Sarah Connor Chronicles (trailer for new TV show):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc7mzoqHahU

A fanfiction Terminator 4 Trailer (made by some guy on the web... not the real trailer, but still cool)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX1tKEyt_iU&NR=1

Bartenders with Flair:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6AnZ-e_-BA&NR=1

OMG, this is not FFR (Fuck Fuck Revolution--a wonderful idea suggested at a party recently) but it's pretty close!
Intimate Video Game Controllers
http://www.jennylc.com/intimate_controllers/

David Deutsch: What is our Place in the Cosmos?
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/47
Interestingly, he argues toward the end that it's too late to do anything about global warming, so instead we should be focusing on learning how to adapt to higher temperatures.

Dean Kamen (inventor of the Segway) demos his new robotic arm technology (my favorite link this month--watch the last 30 seconds of this video!):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hzRja9eunY

Autism: Not Just in the Head? (An interesting article, although it unfortunately a few unfounded stereotypes and assumptions in it)
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/apr/autism-it2019s-not-just-in-the-head

Add facial recognition to the list of things computers can now do better than humans:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18796/
"Sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the match up of face-recognition algorithms showed that machine recognition of
human individuals has improved tenfold since 2002 and a hundredfold since 1995. Indeed, the best face-recognition algorithms now perform more
accurately than most humans can manage. Overall, facial-recognition technology is advancing rapidly."

Wearable displays:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=457670&in_page_id=1965

Paralyzed Mice Walk Again: Scientists Use Nanotechnology to Mend Broken Spinal Cords
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Story?id=3102679&page=1

Hilarious Onion New Network broadcast, via infopractical:
Gap For Kids By Kids

Male Restroom Edicate, via smileycynic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzO1mCAVyMw

Apparently, I can post from work but not from home (whether I use the browser or drivel)... all signs point to ISP problems... unless I got hax0red or something.

Comments

tcpdump output

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, when I send a request to post something more than 500 characters, tcpdump gives me this message. any idea what it means?

12:06:58.315086 IP sixapart-scl-gw.customer.alter.net > 192.168.1.110: ICMP livejournal.com unreachable - need to frag (mtu 1476), length 36

Re: tcpdump output

[ikioi.livejournal.com]

The MTU is the maximum size of an allowed packet on a given link. The "standard" MTU is 1500 bytes. If a packet needs to be sent accross a link and that packet is larger than the MTU for the link, then the packet gets broken into parts (fragments) which have to be reassembled into the original packet further down the line. It's common for DDoS attacks to use things like fake packet fragments to overwhelm routers. The routers use up resources trying to store and reassemble the fake fragements which cannot be reassembled. So, someone fighting off a DDoS attack may turn off fragment re-assembly in their routers and just drop all incoming packet fragments. I believe that your TCP stack should honor the ICMP message and automatically turn down it's fragment size for that connection, but there have been tcp stacks with bugs that broke that behavior, so maybe it's not. You could forcibly turn down the MTU for all packets you generate, to be below the 1476 bytes indicated. I would think that 1300 or 1400 would be a safe size:

/sbin/ifconfig eth0 mtu 1300

Try that and see if (a) it's faster and (b) you get any more messages about needing to fragment from tcp dump.