The World of Stuff goes to the movies

“Seen any good movies lately, Jordon?” you ask.

In fact, yes. And thanks for spelling my name right.

I finally saw Across the Universe last week. It’s that musical that’s set in the ’60s and based on Beatles songs (which feature prominently throughout). I liked it. It’s a timeless story of boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, plus sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and also war. The visuals are appealing, and the music is, of course, great. It was pleasant to hear some of the Beatles’ songs in new and exciting contexts. Who knew “I Want to Hold Your Hand” could be such a sad song? I do now. It was nice to see that their earlier songs weren’t entirely ignored, unlike other recent re-imaginings of the Beatles’ catalogue I could name. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr liked the movie too, so that has to count for something. I would see it again.

I also saw The Corporation, a 2003 documentary that takes a look at the modern corporation and the effects it has on our lives. The problem with corporations is that they’re required by law to make as much money as possible, and they do so without regard to anyone’s interests but their own, “social responsibility” PR notwithstanding. A corporation is considered a legal person, but you can’t put it in jail when it decides that breaking the law is more cost-effective than following it. The film makes the case that if a corporation were a real person, it would be a psychopath. A number of high-profile interviewees (including Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, and Michael Moore) make the case for and against the corporation. I recommend this movie to everyone. If you have a BitTorrent client, you can get it here.

And on Saturday night, I went to see Pixar’s latest film, WALL-E. My friend Nacole invited me, and some other people were there too. It was the first time I had seen her since graduation a year ago, so it was a nice get-together. I also enjoyed the movie. If you couldn’t tell by now, I guess I like most movies. But WALL-E is pretty great. If Nacole (whom I sat next to) is to be believed, just about everything in the movie is cute. But there’s more to it than robots in love. I’ve heard it called a sci-fi film, and it really is. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t read much sci-fi (honest), but central to the plot is how the human condition could be impacted by technology, not to mention the huge corporations that provide it. This bleak angle sets WALL-E apart from Pixar’s earlier films and makes it enjoyable in a different way (in spite of the plugs for Apple, which Pixar thinks it can get away with now that Apple is popular).

A commenter on my last post linked to the web site of Esperanto Lobby. I checked out the site a bit and learned Malgorzata Handzlik, a member of the European Parliament, is a fluent speaker of Esperanto who wants the language to be used more widely in the EU. At first I misread her name as Malzorgata, which would make her a neglected official.

My jokes, they are inaccessible.

Here are (according to someone) the 21 Best Mugshots Evar. #1 is my favorite.

Love to travel? Wikitravel is the travel guide that’s also a wiki.

I like science, but I never liked designing experiments for my science classes. I could never come up with any really original ideas, so I did lame things like watch mold grow on bread or run electric current through salt water. So I envy this kid who, for a science project, found a microbe that eats plastic. Oh, the implications.

Animals speak Esperanto

“Read any good books lately, Jordan?” you ask.

In fact, yes. And it’s Jordon, not Jordan.

Last weekend, I read Gerald Tucker’s Esperanto translation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (Lanterno, Munich, 1970). Supernaturally astute readers will remember that I bought this book several years ago but never read it, nor had I ever read the original in English. I still haven’t read the original, but now I have read it in Esperanto.

I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to understand it and I’d just get frustrated, but I actually managed to understand enough to know what was going on. I got a lot of the allusions to the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union and all that. A few words tripped me up, but I was usually able to guess what they meant. Plus, I kind of knew what was going to happen anyway since everyone read the book in, like, fifth grade.

Maybe if I had gotten a translation of a book that’s unavailable in English, I would have read it sooner. I guess it kind of took the incentive out of reading it since I knew I could just find it in English. But it’s a short book, and I bulldozed through it in a weekend. Nineteen Eighty-Four next? Or, shall I say, Mil Naŭcent Okdek Kvar?

We all need a buck or two or three. My sister is selling our Nintendo 64, which is the only game console either of us has ever had. I’m not much of a gamer, so it’s no big deal. I’ll always have the memories. We would wash cars to buy a game. They went for $50 apiece back in the day. That’s over $60 in today’s money. We only had four games; washing cars is tough work. So, what’s the asking price for the N64 with two controllers four games? $60. People are already responding to the ad, but they all want a lower price. I say no. $60 or best offer means just that.

YouTomb is a project of MIT Free Culture that lists some of the videos that YouTube has removed due to alleged copyright violations. Incidentally, I hope to get involved in the University of Florida’s chapter of Students for Free Culture next year.

Jamie Livingston took one Polaroid snapshot almost every day from March 31, 1979, until his death on October 25, 1997. His friends digitized them, and now his photos of the day are available online. It gets kind of sad, actually. I think the last photo shows him dead.

On a lighter note, here’s why you should never order a cake over the phone.

I can’t has cheezburger

On Tuesday night, I went bowling with Luke, TJ, and some of their friends (and Luke’s brother). I hadn’t seen Luke or TJ since last summer, but since Luke and I talk online all the time, it was like he was never really gone. I swear he got taller. He seems to agree. After playing for two hours at the Pompano Bowl, we went next door to Big Louie’s because I was hungry and it was dinnertime. Then we split. I hope we can have some more fun times soon.

When my peers turned 18, all some of them could talk about was getting a tattoo. In some cases, they’d already thought about what design they wanted. In fact, it seems like everyone I know is getting a tattoo (or two). Some are beautiful, and some are weird. In general, I don’t understand the appeal of having patterns of ink permanently injected into your skin, especially patterns that are seemingly trite or nonsensical.

Someone I know who has one or two tattoos recently posted a MySpace bulletin saying that (for some reason) her next one should be of either Abraham Lincoln or a cheeseburger. I said, “Why choose? Make it Abraham Lincoln eating a cheeseburger.” She said I was the second person to suggest that and that she thought it was a great idea. Although it’s funny, I hope still thinks it’s good idea in 50 years. Or five years.

After all, if you decide your tattoo is stupid, it can be difficult or impossible to remove. Maybe I object to this angle since I am a dude who regrets things. I’d never get a tattoo because of the sheer permanence. I also find them foreign, a little barbaric, and kind of gross with respect to your skin. So tell me: what’s the appeal of having a tattoo?

Natasha, don’t let me dissuade you from getting a tattoo.

Solitaire: we love it. We can’t live without it. But why? Solitaire-y Confinement: Why We Can’t Stop Playing a Computerized Card Game.

Here’s a video showing an animated optical illusion.

There’s a funny thing about the English language (and most languages, in fact). Long ago, when the each people of the world was still getting introduced to the others, it usually came up with its own names for the peoples and places it discovered. For example, the Germans call their own country Deutschland, but the French call it Allemagne and we call it Germany. Of late, the trend has been to use whatever names people call themselves. Ivory Coast has been pretty successful at getting other countries to refer to it as Côte d’Ivoire regardless of the language used, and East Timor is trying to get other countries to call it Timor-Leste. Read more about exonyms and endonyms.

But when we wake, it’s all been erased

The Beatles said “It’s getting better all the time”… but doesn’t that violate the second law of thermodynamics?

Within the past few weeks, Google Maps Street View has come to my neighborhood. Until recently, the closest city it had images for was Miami. Now the Google Maps truck has not only circled my neighborhood but has also covered every major road and street from Hobe Sound to Key West. It even bothered to go to the remote and virtually uninhabited Mainland Monroe. While we’re at it, here’s a Fun Fact for Street View: You can hold the left or right arrow key to turn your field of view, and you can hold the up or down key to go forward or backward quickly.

A few years ago, I became interested in lucid dreaming, which is when you dream while realizing that you’re dreaming. It’s possible to induce lucidity by performing “reality checks” throughout the day, which you’ll then carry into your dreams by habit. But even if you do that, it’s still difficult to have lucid dreams. After a few months, I had only several moments of lucidity. In both, I became conscious of my body lying in bed.

On Saturday night, I had a dream. I was in a small, empty room that had a door that was open to a field. Adam, my roommate from last year, had just moved his bed and other belongings out of the room, and our suitemate Cameron was outside the room as well. I looked at a clock, and I noticed that whenever I looked at it, it read a different time: a common reality check. Now that I knew that I was dreaming, I thought I’d try to call one of the girls I tried to get a date with but couldn’t, just to see what could happen. I took out my cell phone and was deciding between #5 and #6, but I heard clocks ticking and people talking around me. It was my family members who had woken up before me. I figured that if I could hear them, I couldn’t be asleep and dreaming; I must be awake and having an overactive imagination. I decided that if I couldn’t get this scenario going in a dream, then I might as well just wake up. So I did.

Of course, I was asleep, and I was dreaming… right? It’s not very clear. It seems to me that lucid dreaming + being able to hear the sounds around you = being awake and having a wild imagination. On the other hand, although I’ve never gotten very far in a lucid dream, I know from people’s accounts that like real life, you can’t control everything that goes on, only what you do. Contrast this with using your conscious imagination, in which you can picture anything beyond your wildest… oh, never mind.

But this incident has inspired me to start writing down my dreams again because I have the time to do it right after I wake up. I’ve found my dream journal, so I’m good to go. As I flip through the pages, I notice how difficult it is to gleam any useful information from it. My handwriting in it is terrible, as you might expect from someone writing immediately upon waking up. But we need to digitize this baby. I wonder if anyone knows of a program that would be good for cataloging dreams. I’d want to be able to sort them by date and tag them by themes, characters, techniques, and so on. I should be able to browse by tags and search the text of entries. The software must be free and should be in Ubuntu‘s repositories. I am thinking that OpenOffice.org Base might do the trick. I already have it, but I’ve never used it.

Of course, the first thing I thought after waking up from the dream was that I couldn’t even get a date in my dreams.

BitTorrent is a popular protocol for sharing files on the Internet. Sometimes that sharing is unauthorized, so it has frustratingly been banned at various companies and universities. If you have a BitTorrent client, you can use LegalTorrents to find movies, music, books, and more that you’re allowed to share.

Do you find yourself surrounded by dubious statements? Take a cue from Wikipedia and stick [citation needed] stickers next to statements that could use some more explaining.

Everybody has a digital camera these days, and it seems like they don’t last very long before becoming obsolete. We’re used to thinking that more megapixels equals a better quality image, but read why The Megapixel Myth isn’t true.

Blah blah blah

I went ahead and upgraded to Firefox 3 yesterday, leaving a backup of my profile folder in case I wanted to downgrade.

Good things:

• It seems faster. I’m not sure if it actually is, but it seems that way. It might be that I don’t have as many extensions installed (since some of them aren’t yet compatible).
• The AwesomeBar is pretty awesome. I’ve only been using the browser for a day, but I expect to get more accustomed to it.
• Better operating system integration, with a Tango theme that fits right in with everything else on my desktop. The widgets (checkboxes, radio buttons) are nice and smooth the way they should be. Text boxes have rounded edges. And the currently selected tab now has a nice hue to it that I think wasn’t there before. Some buttons are smoother, and others look the same.
• Seems to be tougher on web standards. Despite the aches and pains that this may cause to web designers ‘n’ developers, it’s a good thing. For what it’s worth, Firefox 3 doesn’t render web pages any differently from Firefox 2, but I have to write nicer JavaScript for it.
• You can click on a site’s favicon (or lack thereof) to see the security information. Previously, the most you could see from the main browser window was whether a connection was encrypted. Now, the space around the favicon is blue if a site has basic security measures (“You are connected to example.com and the connection is encrypted”) and green if it has complete identity verification (“You are connected to example.com, which is operated by Example Co., San Francisco, CA, and the connection is encrypted”). In the latter case, the name of the company or organization will show up next to the URL in the address bar. Firefox also warns you rather strongly if a site has a bad security certificate. I think these features are a good idea. Here’s some more info.
• The thing where it asks you to save a password after you’ve tried to log in is cool.
• I like the improvements made to the download window. I may be the only person on Earth who likes Firefox’s download manager the way it is: in a separate window. (A lot of people love the Download Statusbar extension. Tried it, didn’t like it.) In Firefox 3, the download window has been refined a bit: you can search among your downloads, go to the pages where you downloaded each file from, and so on. A message appears in the browser’s status bar tells you how many downloads you have going and how many minutes they have left. And you get a pop-up notification when they’re done.

Bad things:

• It’s still a memory hog from my limited experience. It’s using 455 MB for me right now, but that’s less than it was at a little while ago. It does seem to give unused RAM back, though.
• I thought I’d give the new malware notification feature a try. (This is not to be confused with the similar anti-phishing feature that has been around for a while.) It always seemed to download the list of bad sites when I was loading a page (or pages), which used all of my bandwidth and slowed down page loading massively. I unchecked the option and haven’t had the problem since. I’m smart, and I can recognize suspicious web sites. [Edit Mon Jun 23, 2008 10:55 EST (UTC -5): This problem is caused by an extension and has nothing to do with Firefox's malware protection or Firefox itself.]
• Firefox 3 likes to wreak havoc on my site. It sometimes displays pages without the stylesheet or randomly fails to load random images. Sometimes it starts to load the page without a stylesheet and then applies it an instant later. It only reminds me how bad of a job I did with this layout. (Next time I redesign the site, whenever that may be, I’ll make sure it looks good without a stylesheet. I’ll also blindfold myself and see if I can get around using a screenreader. If not, it’s back to as-yet-nonexistent drawing board.) I’ve set nglayout.initialpaint.delay to a nonzero value, but I’m not sure if that trick still works. We’ll see. [Edit Mon Jun 23, 2008 19:59 EST (UTC -5): This problem was caused by my server's response to an about:config setting that was drastically different from the default for some reason.]

A thing I am ambivalent about:

• Bookmarking. Maybe it’s just that I have too many bookmarks, but the changes in Firefox 3 make bookmarking a little more confusing. One-click bookmarking is simple, but it sends your bookmarks into the “Unsorted Bookmarks” folder, which you kind of have to hunt for. If you just click again, you can choose a folder and add tags. Looks like I won’t be needing the OpenBook extension anymore. But your bookmarks now exist in three separate domains: the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder, the Bookmarks Menu, and your Unsorted Bookmarks. It looks like you can also place bookmarks outside that hierarchy (or non-hierarchy) if you so desire. Anyway, this seems to be an incentive to clean up all the loose bookmarks I’ve had lying around, like four Garfield Minus Garfield cartoons. The bookmarks and history can be found together in the Library, which I would like to be more easily accessible than Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks. (Oh, it’s also available through History -> Show All History. But why not just have a button for the Library?)

I have had other issues, but most of them involve extensions, so they aren’t Firefox’s fault. That said, I recommend upgrading. It’s new, it’s shiny, it’s probably fast. The good outweighs the bad.

I was going to write once again about my lack of romantic companionship, but listening to music and having a good conversation with a friend are therapeutic. I’ll be going with my family to visit my grandparents this weekend. Peace out.

You can see changes in political and graphic design trends by looking at USA political election logos 2008 – 1960. (They go reverse-chronologically, so the name is arguably appropriate.)

Speaking of graphic design: these album covers might hurt your eyes, but they’re really cool. Soulwax: Nite Versions, Any Minute Now.

I’ve always wondered how trigonometric values could be calculated without computers or calculators. I had no idea that there were so many exact trigonometric constants that could be written as ratios of irrational and irrational quantities.

The next generation

It’s been a long time since I dismissed Mozilla Firefox 0.93 as “Netscape on steroids” and then changed my mind after using it for a week. I’ve been using it ever since then, and it’s just kept getting better.

Firefox 3 was released yesterday, picking up 8 million downloads in its first 24 hours. I haven’t upgraded yet, though, because some of the extensions I rely on aren’t yet compatible. (I’m talking to you, Organize Status Bar! How do you expect me to keep my status bar organized without you?) But some people have been using the pre-release versions extensively, and they’ve fallen in love with the fun new features.

Chief among these is the Smart Location Bar, nicknamed the AwesomeBar. Remember when Firefox had the smart idea of including the titles of recently visited pages along with their URLs as you started to type in the address bar? Well, maybe Firefox didn’t invent that feature, but it’s the first browser I ever saw that did it. Anyway, for Firefox 3, they’ve taken the idea a whole step or two further. Now, when you want to find a recently visited web page with the address bar, you don’t have to try to remember the beginning of the URL. You can type any part of the URL or the web page’s title. If you’ve bookmarked the page and described your bookmark with certain tags, you could enter the tags. And if you’ve associated a unique keyword with your bookmark, you can just enter the keyword, and you’ll be there. As you type in the AwesomeBar, the list of URLs is sorted based on how frequently and how recently you’ve visited each page. They call it frecency, and the algorithm’s thresholds are tweakable (via about:config) in case you don’t find them to your liking.

I’ve heard early adopters say that they couldn’t think of going back to Firefox 2 and not having the Awesomebar. It makes your browser cache much more important since it’s easier to go back pages you’ve previously visited. If you’ve cleared your cache, Firefox can’t suggest any matching web pages for you (other than the ones you’ve bookmarked). So the default length of time to keep web pages cached has increased from 9 days to 90. I imagine that having such a large cache could slow down the browser, so I’ll probably set the number to around 30 days and not delete the cache every week. But we’ll see. I haven’t even upgraded yet.

Other outward improvements: the default theme now fits in with whatever operating system or window manager you’re using. There are separate themes for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X, GNOME, and… I guess KDE, although I haven’t seen any screenshots of that one. Little no-brainer things, too: now, when you enter a password for the first time, Firefox will wait until after you successfully (or unsuccessfully) log in before asking if you want to save the password. Also, one-click bookmarking. In addition to visible improvements, they’ve made a lot of changes on the inside. For example, they seem to have fixed a lot of bugs that were causing Firefox to hog much more memory than it needed. And then there are the things the average person probably doesn’t care about, like passing the Acid2 test. (It even does pretty okay on Acid3.) All very cool stuff.

And so, Browser War II continues, with Firefox continuing to chip away at Internet Explorer’s market share. Microsoft is working hard on IE 8, which adheres surprisingly well to web standards. And just like they did when Firefox 2 was released, the IE team has sent Mozilla a cake to congratulate them on releasing Firefox 3. (It’s the least they folks could do; without Firefox, they wouldn’t have a job!)

So, here’s a guide to new features in Firefox 3, and — if you’re ready — you can download Firefox 3. For those of you who are interested in Browser War I and the genesis of the Mozilla project, be sure to check out Code Rush, a documentary that covered the Netscape developers as they freed the source code of Netscape Navigator and waited for the world to pitch in.

And now, some other links and stuff:

Have you ever wanted to rent a dog? Who hasn’t? Well, now you can.

Here Top 25 Most Visited Tourist Destinations in America. I’ve been to four of them. Anyone want to guess which ones?

Extract the datelines from 72,000 wire-service news stories spanning four years, and you can make a map of Where News Breaks.

Family history

Once in a while I wonder about my ancestors and distant cousins. Sometimes I decide to research them. My curiosity bit me again the other day, so I decided Googling both the Croatian and English versions of my family name. I had already gotten some information together in GRAMPS, so it was just a matter of adding people to it. Before I knew it, I was finding a lot of family members through obituary records and the like.

I decided to create a Kalilić/Kalilich Family Genealogy page to document my efforts and encourage other members of the family to contribute. As it happens, I’ve gotten back in touch with my cousin Michael, who discovered me on the Internet a few years ago. It turns out that he’s been talking to one of our other cousins in the old country, and he’s going over to visit in a few months. How about that?

All the information on the web page I’ve been able to find on the Internet for free. I’m actually pretty surprised at how easy it is to find indexes (or indices) of obituaries and death certificates. Immigration records are even online for free at ellisisland.org; those records have been very useful in determining which members of the family came to America when and how. I guess it’s especially easy for me to search for things since the name I’m looking for is so rare (and probably even peculiar to my own family). Anyway, I’ve ordered copies of a couple of death certificates, including one for someone I’ve never heard of.

I’ve only just begun to figure out how the American branch of the family relates to the European branch. The immigration records shed some light on common ancestors, but there’s not enough information yet. I’m eager to ask my European cousins that I know of how they think everything might fit together. I wonder if they know about the member of the family who died in the Jasenovac concentration camp during World War II. I guess the intrigue of genealogy is that it often raises more questions than it answers.

Here are some programming jokes. One of my favorites:

See also: Computer Stupidities: Programming.

Here’s a video of Picasso’s Guernica in 3-D (Flash, sound).

If I had to implement a CAPTCHA on my site (which I currently don’t), I would choose reCAPTCHA. The creators of reCAPTCHA figured that all the time that people all over the world spend solving CAPTCHAs should be put toward something useful. So whenever you fill out a reCAPTCHA, you’re helping to digitize old books by typing in words that computers can’t recognize. (You receive two words; one that the computer knows and one that it doesn’t. If you correctly enter the one that the computer knows, it will assume that you’ve entered the other one right as well.) So, bit by bit, you’re helping spread human knowledge. And when the reCAPTCHA is cracked, spambots will coolly and efficiently help spread human knowledge.

Culture wants to be free

In my previous discussions of copyright, I mentioned that I was reading Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. I’ve finished the book, so now I’d like to offer my thoughts.

In short, Lessig describes how the current copyright system is broken and his attempts and ideas for fixing it. He explains the history of copyright law, which dates back to olde England, where the first law protecting authors and their written works for a limited period was passed in 1710. Toward the end of the century, the framers of the US Constitution saw it fit to declare in Article I, Section 8, that “Congress shall have the power … To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors … the exclusive Right to their … Writings …”

Congress passed America’s first copyright law in 1790. Registered works would be protected for 14 years, with an optional 14-year renewal, so the maximum term was 28 years. Over the next 170 years, Congress extended the maximum term twice, to 42 years in 1831 and to 56 years in 1909. Not all works were registered for copyright protection, and only a small percentage of copyrights were renewed; the vast majority of works were no longer deemed commercially viable by their publishers, so they passed into the public domain without renewal. What’s more, copyright restrictions originally applied to verbatim copies; the concept of “derivative works” wasn’t introduced until 1870, and at that time it applied only to translations and dramatizations.

During this time, America’s culture flourished as creative minds built on past works in novel ways. Lessig notes in particular that Walt Disney became a household name by borrowing from 19th-century authors as well as contemporary popular culture; Steamboat Willie was a parody of the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill, Jr., which had been released only a few months earlier. Disney and others benefited from a free culture in which works of the past (and, to some extent, works of the present) could spur creativity by being appropriated and re-interpreted.

In recent years, things have changed. The courts have greatly expanded the definition of derivative works. Copyright protection is granted automatically without the need for so much as a copyright notice, and it can be hard to get permission to use a copyrighted work if you can’t figure out who owns the copyright. It’s now an opt-out system rather than an opt-in one. And since 1962, Congress has extended the term of copyright 11 times. Nowadays, the copyright term for a typical work lasts until 70 years after the author’s death. The result is copyright terms that could last 150 years or more. Every time important works are scheduled to enter the public domain, Congress intervenes and pushes copyright terms further. Many works published as early as 1923 are still copyrighted. Our free culture is dying because everything around us is shackled by unprecedented terms of oppressive copyright restrictions. We have nothing to turn to for creativity but the increasingly distant public domain and our own solitary minds.

Recently, Lessig was involved in an important court case involving copyright. His client, Eric Eldred, would post public domain books on his web site. In 1998, after the latest copyright extension act was passed, he posted books that should have passed into the public domain that year but whose copyright was extended by the new law. This got him into some legal trouble, and Lessig and others represented him. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Lessig tried to prove that if Congress had the power to extend copyright terms as much as it wanted, then it was acting outside its Constitutional power to secure copyright terms “for limited Times.” Unfortunately, the court ruled 7-2 against Eldred.

In the book, Lessig mentions two possible solutions to help bring back our free culture. The first is Creative Commons, an organization he founded that provides licenses for content creators to apply to their works. These licenses allow authors to relinquish some of the exclusive rights to their work and let others know what they can and can’t do with the work. For example, I have decided to make the content of this web site available under the terms of an Attribution-ShareAlike license. You can do anything you want with anything on my web site—translate it into Japanese, make a collage out of the pictures, perform it as a musical, publish it as a book and sell it—provided that you attribute me properly and release your new work under the same license so that others can be free to do with it what they wish. Other licenses provide other options.

Lessig’s other possible solution is copyright reform. He proposes a sort of return to the old system. He suggests that while copyright protection should still be granted automatically, the term should be 50 years with the possibility of renewal for a nominal fee. Under this system, when a work is renewed, it is added to a central registry so that people can be sure whether it is still copyrighted or in the public domain. The addition of a nominal renewal fee would allow the 97% of creative works that are out of print to enter the public domain early—just like in the olden days—while the 3% that are still being sold would get additional protection. This way, we wouldn’t have out-of-print books rotting on the bookshelves for 100 years or more because the publishing company (or its corporate successor) is jealously guarding a right that it will never again exercise.

So that’s Free Culture in a nutshell, unless I forgot something. It really is an interesting read, and I recommend it to everyone. Fortunately, the book is not only available in print but also online. So get Free Culture! The PDF version of the book is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, meaning you can share it with your friends, translate it, record it as an audiobook, or whatever—just as long as you give the author credit and you don’t use it for commercial purposes.

Recently, I talked about the benefits of using encryption for e-mail. It turns out that there’s a new virus going around that encrypts your data so that you can’t access it. The antivirus software company Kaspersky estimates that 15,000,000 modern computers would have to work for a year to crack the 1024-bit key. In my previous post, I was making up numbers as to how easily such keys could be cracked. By extension, I estimate that it would take 8.7 × 10⁹³¹ computer-years to crack a 4096-bit key like the one I use to encrypt my e-mail. But computing power increases exponentially by Moore’s law, and effective encryption-breaking algorithms may be devised, so who knows what the future will bring?

Dennis Kucinich is my hero. He’s brought some articles of impeachment of George W. Bush. Of course, the rest of the Democrats are too chicken to follow through with it, so everybody thinks the idea is ridiculous and that Kucinich is a loony. But think about what Bill Clinton got impeached for.

TV shows automatically get funnier when you bleep out random words. Thus: Boy Meets World: Director’s Cut.

Here’s a company that’s making a tiny electric car: Myers Motors (Flash/sound warning).

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It’s important to back up your data. It’s also important to make sure that your backup works. Otherwise, there’s no point to having it. Case in point: I got an external hard drive last year, and I used it to back up my data every week until about a month ago, when it stopped working. Since you I can’t take it apart without voiding the warranty, I have decided to have the hard drive replaced. This entails mailing it back to the manufacturing company, who will send me a new one and pay me back for the shipping.

In a way, this wasn’t a big loss for me. I don’t keep anything extra special on that drive… if by “extra special” you mean “things I don’t already have on my computer.” The downside here is that the opposite is true. Copies of the things I do already have on my computer are on there: my e-mails, snapshots, demo recordings, chat logs, Internet bookmarks, home movies, books, legally downloaded music, programming projects… everything. Luckily, it’s all safe and sound right here on the laptop. But the point is, somebody somewhere is going to potentially have a copy of it. And that’s not cool.

I foresaw the possibility of losing the data on the drive, but I didn’t think I’d have warranty service, which would expose my valuable data to theft, copying, or mockery by employees of the company. I wouldn’t even know the thing had a warranty if I hadn’t seen the words “One Year Warranty” printed in eensy letters on one side of the box. I’ll have to encrypt the contents of the drive next time, perhaps with something like TrueCrypt, maybe. (Then, if I ever had to send it back to the manufacturer again, they’d be all, “No wonder this thing didn’t work… the contents of the drive are indistinguishable from random data!” Encryption pwns.)

Last night, as I was trying to go to sleep, I was thinking about things. I was thinking about how I’ve been home from college for over a month now. I haven’t gotten a job. I haven’t gotten behind the wheel of a car. And I haven’t really talked to anybody. Uh, I haven’t really talked to anybody. I mean… well, hold on.

I was thinking about those things. They sound pretty worrying. But they had only just arrived in my mind. And I wasn’t terribly bothered by them. I was happy. I was happy not having to worry about anything. I’ve had a stressful eight months, and it’s been nice to have a peaceful month to break things up. I look forward to a few more.

Here at home, I don’t have to worry about exams or getting to class on time or scheduling visits to the chiropractor. I don’t have to worry about where I should spend my money on food or how long it would to take to walk to the grocery store. What’s more, I am not worrying about girls. I bombed spectacularly this year. I probably shouldn’t wallow in my past failures as much as I do, but I just have to lay these out for consideration: one two three four five non-dates. FIVE.

The conclusion is clear. Dating: I’m doing it wrong. With each failed attempt, I learn a little more about what I did wrong and what I should do the next time. But seriously. Counting high school, this makes seven dates I haven’t been on, and seven girlfriends I could have had. WTF? It seems that the only way to get out of this mess (and believe me, it’s not a self-esteem booster) is to undergo some drastic change… like, for example, literally becoming someone else. Can they do that with today’s technology?

Oh yeah, uh, anyway, it is really great that I am here by myself.

Four years ago, I took the Yankee or Dixie Quiz to see whether my speaking style was more Northern or Southern. Though I didn’t specify my exact score, I recall that it was between 47 and 49%, barely on the Yankee side of things. I just took the quiz again the other day, and my score is now 63%, firmly in the Southern camp, which I find rather odd because there’s not a lot of Southern cultural influence here in South Florida. Recently, I’ve started to pronounce aunt as “ahnt” rather than “ant” and route as “raut” rather than “root.” The quiz says that my new pronunciations are favored in the North. I don’t know why I changed, but I think it was a subconscious move to avoid using confusing homophones. Apparently I’m a closet homophonophobe.

This is pretty cool: it’s an interactive panorama from a hot-air balloon. It’s like those crazy QuickTime ones that were popular a few years back, but this one is in Flash, so it will probably work for most people.

Another one from CollegeHumor: If you have trouble talking about Lost, maybe Losticil is right for you. (This is probably funnier for those of you who watch the show.)

Security!

You wouldn’t write sensitive personal information on a postcard, so why would you do it in an e-mail? When you send an e-mail, it travels through various servers before reaching its destination. Anyone who has access to the e-mail servers can read the e-mail that you send. It could be an employee of the company operating the server, someone who has broken into the server, or a law enforcement agency. You probably don’t want people reading your e-mail in the same way that you wouldn’t want them listening to your phone calls, opening your letters, or watching you go about your business in your home.

So, if you value your right to privacy, what can you do about your e-mail? The safest thing to do (short of not e-mailing at all) is encrypting your e-mail. This makes it virtually impossible for anyone but the intended recipient to read it. In the same way that you wouldn’t submit your credit card information to a web site without a secure HTTP connection, you shouldn’t be content to send private e-mails through the open air, so to speak. Now, if you’re like me, maybe you’ve considered using e-mail encryption but have written it off as too much of a hassle for a security method that no one uses. But plenty of people do use it, and it’s pretty simple. So I’m going to explain it for you.

First, some terms. By far, the most common encryption standard for e-mail is OpenPGP, which I’ll just refer to as PGP since I’m lazy. The PGP standard utilizes public-key cryptography. With public-key cryptography, you have two sequences of alphanumeric characters that are called “keys”: a private key and a public key. As the names imply, the public key should be made public so that anyone can encrypt a message to you. The private key should always be kept a secret because it allows you to decrypt messages that are sent to you.

So, when I want to send an encrypted e-mail to my friend Luke, I look for his public key. I might find it on an Internet key server that has a searchable database of people’s public keys, or he might have it posted on his own web site, or I might receive it from him in person. Maybe he’ll just e-mail it to me. Once I have his key, I use it to encrypt a message to him. If some baddies intercept it along the way, it’ll be unintelligible; they’ll just see garbled mess of characters where the body of the message should be. When Luke gets it, he’ll be able to decrypt the message with his private key. Then, when he sends me a message, he’ll encrypt it with my public key, and I’ll decrypt it with my private key. Now that we have each other’s public keys saved, so we can send each other encrypted e-mails in a flash. (In each case, our e-mail programs handle the actual mathematics of encryption and decryption. We don’t literally have to do it ourselves!)

PGP can also be used to sign e-mails. In real life, when you write your signature on something, it implies your authorship or approval of whatever you’re signing. But that’s not always true. Someone could ask you to sign a blank sheet of paper and then type an angry letter on it and mail it to your grandmother. When you sign an e-mail with your secret PGP key, it ensures that you wrote the message. And unlike an ink signature, your digital PGP signature reflects what you actually wrote. If you sign an e-mail saying “Hello, Luke!”, the signature will indicate that you (and not anyone else) wrote the words “Hello, Luke!” (and nothing else). But if a bad guy intercepts the e-mail and changes it to say “Hello, Puke!” before passing it on, he won’t be able to update the signature because only you have the secret key that can be used to properly sign the message. So, when Luke gets an e-mail from you calling him Puke, his e-mail program will show that the signature is bad and that your message was probably tampered with. (Caveat: the bad guy could just remove the signature entirely if the message isn’t encrypted. But if you make a habit of at least signing your e-mails, this should come across to your recipient as unusual.)

Incidentally, although PGP is mainly used for e-mail, it can be used to encrypt or sign any file. This could be handy, for example, if you have to store private files on a remote server or an external hard drive. You can encrypt files the with your own public key and decrypt them with your private key later.

The encryption methods that PGP uses are considered secure. Basically, all encryption is breakable, but “secure” encryption requires infeasible amounts of time or computing power to crack. There is no known way to crack PGP’s encryption methods other than to use “brute force,” which means trying every possible key, a process which could take massive amounts of computing power. For example, my encryption key is 4,096 bits long, which means it’s one of 2⁴⁰⁹⁶ possible keys. How many is that? Let’s just say I am surprised that my computer’s calculator could handle it. It’s more than 10¹²³³, or 1 with 1,233 zeroes, a number that defies comprehension. There probably isn’t that many of any physical thing in the universe. If a computer could try 1,000,000 keys per second, it could take as long as 3.31 × 10¹²¹⁹ years to find the right key. If you had 500,000 such computers and you found the right key after trying only 0.00001% of all possible keys, it would still take them 6.62 × 10¹²⁰⁶ years. The universe, by comparison, is 13.7 × 10⁹ years old. I’m not even sure if my math is right, but the point is that your key would have to be guessed, and that’s an extremely difficult operation.

Still, though, I have my PGP key set to expire; that means that people should not use it to encrypt e-mails to me after a certain date. (I’ve chosen for my key to be valid for five years.) I believe this is important because the encryption algorithms that my key uses may eventually be cracked so that the right key can be found relatively quickly without resorting to brute force. I certainly wouldn’t want the security of all of my e-mail to be compromised if that happens. And while I’ve chosen the greatest key length that my PGP software currently supports, it may allow for larger keys in the future.

That’s all I have to say about PGP itself. Now it’s time to make some recommendations. The best PGP software is probably GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) because it’s free as in price and free as in freedom. It’s available for Mac OS X and Windows. If you’re using Linux, you probably already have it. You’ll also need a tool to integrate GnuPG with your e-mail client or web browser. If you use Mozilla Thunderbird for your e-mail, I recommend the Enigmail extension, which is what I use. If you use web-based e-mail with the Mozilla Firefox browser, try FireGPG; it integrates especially well with Gmail, but you can use it to encrypt or decrypt the contents of any text box.

Whether I’ve converted you just now or you’re a longtime PGP user, I encourage you to send me a signed and encrypted e-mail. I have a copy of my public key on this site and on keyservers such as this one. The version on this site is what I got when I exported the key from Enigmail, and the version on the keyservers is what Enigmail sent to them. For reasons I can’t understand, they appear to be slightly different, but they are actually the same key. I think that’s normal. You can verify that both copies of the key work, and that the key applies to both my personal and school e-mail addresses. You can also verify that the key’s ID is 0xD90D8E6A, that its fingerprint is 1639 9F9E 404D 26D3 EC1C 5768 A3DC A43B D90D 8E6A, and that it expires on June 1, 2013. So shoot me an e-mail (or two) and let’s get encryptin’!

And now, the word of the day: bioluminescence.

In Russia, cashiers rip your receipt before they give it to you. Why? It’s just an old habit.

Here’s a clever way to present a poem: One Day Poem Pavilion (Flash video).