Another good reason to avoid all forms of Internet censorship software and services. 
I like Podtube. There are lots of videos on YouTube that I think are delicious. Though I'm not wild about the iPod video format, it's nice to be able to take videos from YouTube and watch them on my Mac.
Matt has found a George Bush/U2 mashup. I was more hoping for a Charles Clarke/Danny La Rue mashup, but this will have to do.
Google Scholar has been upgraded.
I missed this story, but it's got a nice little corker from Timothy Williamson at Oxford: "Philosophy teaches you how to detect bad arguments, so it's no surprise when politicians aren't keen for it to be studied."
Kosso has found a great little way of getting data out of the BBC. A few days of cogitating and I'll find something I can do with this...
Another little thing I've missed by my absence from the blogosphere for the last few days are the thousands of pics from Mike Arrington's do the other day. If you've got a second monitor, open up a big Firefox window, plonk it on your secondary monitor and hit "View as Slideshow". Enjoy the warm, yummy San Fran goodness - especially Marc Canter's orange shirt. And, WTF?
Oh my. A church dedicated to Tom Jones? In Sacramento? And there's a website. Check out some of the sermons.
collision detection has a writeup of Steorn - an Irish company claiming to have produced a free energy machine, and that it is "blasphemy" to question the laws of thermodynamics. Here's the thing. Most people don't know much about thermodynamics. Mention entropy and their eyes glaze over. Why exactly are they going to care if their "sacred" Laws of Thermodynamics are questioned. For the vast majority of people, thermodynamics means nothing. It's sheer conspiratorialism to think that Joe Public is going to really give a damn about the laws of thermodynamics.
You guys won't believe this. I lost my National Insurance number a while back and I need it for university. I phoned up the Revenue & Customs *cough*shits*cough* and they told me it would take two weeks to send it. I called up the folks at Student Finance Direct and they gave it to me over the phone. Thanks to technology, I'm not going to lose it again. I just dropped myself an e-mail with the number. Now if I need it, I can just Google it in Gmail.
Dental troubles 
Oh man, I've got to get emergency dental treatment and I'm currently uninsured. I can't find an NHS dentist around here. Why am I uninsured? Well, I'm a student, and that means I'm in Nowhere Zone health-wise. A lot of dentists will cover university students as if they were children on the NHS scheme. But it's not quite worth getting insured.
Getting insurance is a major PITA and something I haven't gotten around to. Getting on an NHS patients list is also a PITA, and can mean a three month wait. It's also possible to have emergency treatment privately and then claim it back - and everyone says that students should do this - but it doesn't really work, I don't think.
This system really is unbelievably complicated. The NHS, the insurance companies and the practitioners really ought to get together and put up a website detailing how to get dental treatment in the UK, otherwise more people will go languishing in pain without treatment. Which, as my lower back teeth have found out, is a bummer.
Update: Sorted it. Found a dentist who'll see me on the NHS. I'll probably get private insurance soon enough but for now I'm in a lot of pain and need treatment as soon as possible.
Where to go with OPML
Hil thinks that it would be cool to track cross-blog conversation through outlining. Absolutely, that would be very cool. I'm going to have a think about whether it's possible to do this. It's certainly possible with inclusion.
I'm also planning an OPML application that will let you browse your YouTube videos easier. This will be quite similar to the digg browser that I've put together.
