I came across this list of 20 Ways to Attack Shyness. I found it especially useful because I am a dude who can sometimes be characterized as shy. From there, I found this other site called succeedsocially.com. Now, I am a dude who knows he has a problem and sometimes tries to seek help. I am also a dude who reads Dinosaur Comics to the point that it affects his informal speech patterns, but that's beside the point.

I am a cool guy. People I meet on the Internet can sense it right away. To them, I'm someone they want to discuss deep things and/or make out with. People I've gotten to know well in person know it's true too. It's the people I'm just meeting in person that I have a hard time convincing. I have a hard time showing the real me succinctly through my actions. I'm not very assertive. This I am working to change.

What else could I change while I'm at it? I mean, it's one thing to talk to people more when you're in a group, but it's quite another to get out more and clean up your appearance. We (well, some people) draw a line. Improving your social skills so people will like you is one thing; improving your appearance so people will like you is going too far. Why? Could it be that it really doesn't matter how you look? I've heard that, but I'm not sure if it's true.

On the one hand, Everyone Is Special® and You Shouldn't Try to Be Someone You're Not™. On the other hand, I'm kind of unkempt-looking. Which is better? On the Internet, no one knows I wear t-shirts and jean shorts every day. They can't see how frizzy my hair is, and I can go a few extra days without shaving. But they like me, or rather, they like my mind. In real life, am not very convincing. That's why maybe I need to get a haircut and get rid of my old clothes so I'm not tempted to wear them.

The Succeed Socially site lists two "dorky" hairstyles to avoid. One is that crew cut thing everyone had in the '50s. The other is "long straight hair that parts in the middle and goes down to around the bottom of your neck." That is my hairstyle. I like it because it kind of looks good on me. On the other hand, it's not very masculine, and I'm convinced it would look ridiculous on almost anyone else. Also, it's always frizzy. I've talked about it recently.

As for the clothes, I think I'd have to wear more collared shirts and explore the world of non-denim pants. I'd just have to dress a little more formally, I guess. I've tried buying those styles before, but I fall back on my more comfortable t-shirts and shorts. That's why I should get rid of them and make formal the new comfortable.

But however important looks may be, they are still secondary to actions. If only I had known that before I started to diet and exercise, I could have saved myself a lot of effort. Although looks can play a role in how we perceive others, a skinny person is not an attractive person. An assertive person is.

So maybe someday I'll have a girlfriend.

One Ask Jordon today:

danielle: what do you do if ur sister bullyin you and says she would be in jail for ur murder ?

Tell your parents.

Since tomorrow is The Fourth of July, here are some America-related links:

They're going to be rolling out a new citizenship test soon. Here are 20 of the harder questions. I got 100%.

Here's a list of controversial invocations of the "USA PATRIOT" Act.

The houses of Congress vote on a lot of bills every day. (Well, every day they're in session.) But they don't read the bills that go up for voting. So for any given bill, most members of Congress don't even know exactly what they're voting on. These are the people we're trusting to pass laws. A Read the Bills Act is in order.

These deleted files aren't normally accessible. But there are programs that scan hard drives for unlisted, "deleted" files. If you're going to be selling a hard drive or flash drive, the security implications are enormous. There are numerous accounts of people buying old hard drives or camera memory cards on eBay and using "undelete" utilities to find photos and even credit card numbers. Today I decided to try out one such program to find files I had deleted from my flash drives. The program I used is called Magic Rescue, and it's available as magicrescue in Ubuntu's repositories and probably other Linux distributions. So this is a Linux program, but there are similar tools for other operating systems.

Magic Rescue works by scanning a drive for certain file types that you specify and outputting any that it finds into a separate folder (which should be on a separate drive to prevent the program from duplicating the same files over and over again and entering an infinite loop). It works on any filesystem or lack thereof. To use magicrescue, you need to know the device name of the drive you're going to work on. It should be in /dev. For me, it was /dev/sdb1 whenever I had one flash drive plugged in. I was able to find this by going to the GNOME Partition Editor (gparted), but there's probably a better way. In any case, do find out the right device name before you run the program, or else infinite loops might happen and the world will explode. You might also want to unmount the drive. I'm not sure if it's necessary, but it couldn't hurt.

The folder /usr/share/magicrescue/recipes contains "recipes," or brief scripts for recognizing certain types of files. If you need a recipe that's not there, you might be able to find it on the Internet or, if you're really good, write it yourself. Some of them require programs that you may not have; to extract JPEGs, you need jpegtran (which I was able to get by installing libjpeg-progs). You use the -r flag to specify any or all of the recipes when doing a search. The -d flag says where you want to place any files that Magic Rescue finds. The final argument is the location of the drive being searched. Here's what I ran when I searched a "blank" flash drive for some file types that I'd be likely to put on there:

sudo magicrescue -r avi -r gimp-xcf -r gzip -r mp3-id3v2 -r msoffice -r zip -r png -r jpeg-exif -r jpeg-jfif -d ~/found-new /dev/sdb1

Maybe it wasn't necessary to include the -r a million times? But it worked anyway, and I found some pretty interesting stuff. It tended to find more recent files, which, in the case of one of my flash drives, were projects from my senior year of high school. Many different revisions of a few Microsoft Office files were retrieved, which gives some indication about how they're saved. My camera's memory cards revealed more secrets. Again, most of the photos it found were recent, but I recognized one as being from April 2005. I went back to my folder of April 2005 photos just to be sure, and... it wasn't there. I knew I had taken 62 photos that particular day, and here was a final 63rd that the camera never told me about.

So you see, deleting files doesn't delete them for good, and in fact, they can remain for years. So you're going to want to get rid of them for good. Luckily, this is possible. Just as there are programs that can scour drives for deleted files, there are others that can overwrite them so they would be very hard (if not impossible) to recover. The GNU utility for this is called shred. (Windows has a similar tool whose name escapes me.) shred can obscure individual files or an entire drive by writing random data or zeroes. By default it does this 25 times.

I took one of my "blank" flash drives (that had 45 recoverable files on it) and used shred to overwrite the whole drive with random data five times and once more with zeroes. Again, the drive had been unmounted. And again, if you try this, be very, very sure of which device you're shredding.

sudo shred -n5 -z /dev/sdb1

This took about 10 minutes to complete on a 64 MB flash drive. Once it was done, there was absolutely nothing on the drive, not even a filesystem. When I ran Magic Rescue on it again, it found nothing. I reformatted it to make it usable again, and it was ready to go, as though the old files had never existed. (Just to be sure, I ran Magic Rescue again after reformatting, and it still didn't find anything.)

So before you give away that old computer or camera, remember that reformatting the hard drive or memory card isn't enough. Your data could still be retrievable using simple tools. You have to actually overwrite the old data, preferably a large number of times, so your sensitive financial information and/or drunken party photos don't get into the wrong hands.

Back in the '50s, being a paperboy was a big deal. Check out the Cleveland Press's Carrier's Handbook from back in the day. Later, the newspapers figured out they could save money by just throwing papers out of a truck.

As most older Americans can tell you where they were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, longtime South Floridians can tell you what they were doing on January 19, 1977, when it snowed here for the first time in recorded history. Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of snow events in Florida.

How much do you know about the Nobel Prizes? Here are 12 Things You May Not Know About the Nobel Prizes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).