Category: Blogosphere

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: His Exalted Highness Duke Geoffrey the Extemporaneous of Tempting St Mary Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

(Via pecunium.)

This is why:

OpenDNS, the San Francisco security startup that runs the PhishTank anti-phishing initiative, has been hit by a massive DDoS (distributed denial-of-service attack).
The 400mbps botnet attack did not affect the company’s core recursive DNS resolution service. The OpenDNS.com home page and corporate blog were crippled for about 90 minutes on Dec. 1.
The attack appears to be targeting EveryDNS, a sibling business owned and operated by OpenDNS CEO David Ulevitch. OpenDNS uses services from EveryDNS.

I actually got hit from two directions. First, I use EveryDNS as the DNS authority for geoffarnold.com. Second, it turns out that one of EveryDNS’s servers was located in the same physical rack as grommit (the system that hosts geoffarnold.com), so the attack consumed most of the bandwidth into our (shared) switch.

Via Pharyngula:
“Get on your blog, link to http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2006/11/measuring_the_s.html, and let’s see how quickly we can saturate the blogosphere.”

Tim Bray alerted me to a fascinating on-line test of pitch perception, called Test your musical skills in 6 minutes!

While working at the music and neuroimaging lab at Beth Israel/Harvard Medical School in Boston, I developed a quick online way to screen for the tonedeafness. It actually turned out to be a pretty good test to check for overall pitch perception ability. The test is purposefully made very hard, so excellent musicians rarely score above 80% correct. Give it a try!

To my amazement, I scored 94.4%.

River’s back. I’m sure I’m not the only person who checked her blog regularly, saw no new postings, and wondered with a sinking heart whether she had fallen victim to the violence that engulfs her country. As she said,

This has been the longest time I have been away from blogging. There were several reasons for my disappearance the major one being the fact that every time I felt the urge to write about Iraq, about the situation, I’d be filled with a certain hopelessness that can’t be put into words and that I suspect other Iraqis feel also.

And then she rips into those who are criticizing the latest Johns Hopkins/Lancet study.

There are Iraqi women who have not shed their black mourning robes since 2003 because each time the end of the proper mourning period comes around, some other relative dies and the countdown begins once again.

As Andrew Sullivan puts it, “How to disagree? She is living this nightmare. We are merely watching it unfold.”

Via Terry:

You scored as Moya (Farscape). You are surrounded by muppets. But that is okay because they are your friends and have shown many times that they can be trusted. Now if only you could stop being bothered about wormholes.

Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com

Via Charlie in Colorado, here’s a hilarious pen commercial disguised as a graphology test.

Via an Amazon colleague, here are my personal dna results. Apparently I’m a “benevolent leader”. Mouse over the graphic for details….

An interesting example of the web-quiz genre, with some nice (AJAX?) graphical choice widgets.

I was updating my profile at the UK social networking site, Friends Reunited, and decided to pay attention to a question that I’d hitherto ignored: “What are your 20 favourite words”. This is what I came up with:
love, peace, new, unexpected, honest, whimsy, intense, tranquil, touch, trust, humanism, experiment, imagination, learn, reflection, evolution, revolution, reason, create, teach

Scott Adams captures the zeitgeist:

All non-fiction best-selling opinion books are nothing more than your own opinions fed back to you with seasoning. Ann Coulter sells to conservatives who agree with her. Al Franken sells to liberals who agree with him. And they do it brilliantly, in my opinion.

And what happens if you violate the pattern?

I often have no opinion at all about how we should deal with a world issue because I rarely feel I have enough information to make a good call. What I do have is strong opinions on how we should be THINKING about a problem. I’m all about the process[…] Thinking about the best way to approach a problem is so rare and unexpected that it causes cognitive dissonance in many readers. They want me to have an opinion so they can agree with it or disagree. So they solve the dissonance by assigning me to an opinion they have heard before – “cheese-eating surrender monkey” for example. And then they attack the opinion they hallucinated me to have.

And of course the reason that I enjoyed this piece is because I agree with it…. Scott just served up one of my opinions, with seasoning. Which demonstrates that even his “process” bias represents an opinion that people can endorse or reject. (It’s turtles all the way down.)