I haven’t really talked much about Audioscrobbler, but I’ve an idle moment. The idea is great, an open-source project that monitors the music you play on your computer, and works out which artists and songs you like most. Armed with this data, it can then work out which bands are similar and what songs you might like but haven’t yet heard. I’ve been a member for about a month (no recommendations yet, though they have been busy fixing server holdups recently). But the idea is still neat - in a world where we get so much information thrown at us, having benevolent, helpful spyware doing recommendations for all kinds of media (we could have similar schemes for hypertext and video) is one way of helping refine what we get and allow us to make meaningful choices. They’ve (apparently) reopened the signup process so go join if you’re interested.

Audioscrobbler’s is great, though I can think of some extras I’d like - how about a linkup with The Covers Project so that you can find out remixes and covers of songs you like (maybe that’s just the music geek in me). Also, badly tagged files can muck up the data, but rather than use the slightly heavy-handed method of tagging files by analysing the audio and looking up the resulting fingerprint in a database, why not use the existing title data? You could compare a song’s title in its ID3 tag to existing titles in the database. If it doesn’t match a title exactly, do some some Bayesian analysis comparing it with existing titles and work out which is the correct way to spell it, and re-tag accordingly.

At this point the first condom filled with flour biffs him in the back, skids off, and goes on to spray all over Gordon Brown. How perfectly apt! It was aimed at Blair, but it glanced off him and it hit Brown! The protesters had hurled Britain’s most successful metaphor!

Simon Hoggart’s coverage of the purple flour incident is up to his usual standard of wry observation.

On the other hand, Hansard’s coverage is much drier and much more, well, British.

That £600,000 security screen in the house of Commons is obviously doing its job well.

Update: The Internet’s mighty gears grind into action: Tom Watson supplies some live-from-the-scene blog commentary, while b3ta’s crack squad of photoshoppers get on the case instantly.

Further update: I do a fairly rubbish bit of ’shopping, while Tim Ireland does a much better one

How Much Is Inside? is how I really should have spent my time at university. A bunch of students take things we take for granted and find out how big they are - how many feet of noodles there are in a packet of Ramen , the area of a puddle of blood from an average human and most fittingly for American students, how many cups there are in a keg of beer (Answer: Just about enough to tide you over before dinner, if you’re a Brit).

(via Memepool)

Got sunburnt for the first time in years today (after spending the whole day here), which shocked me as I’m normally quite resistant to sunlight, though of late I’ve been quite pallid, so I suppose I was going to go pink at the first sign of nice weather.

Right, onto more serious matters - a couple of weeks ago I jumped to conclusions about the Mirror ‘torture’ photos and the conduct of British forces - since then the photos have been proven wrong, so my apologies to anyone I might have offended in my hastiness to condemn.

Also, sorry if the blog has been a bit sparse or dull of late, I’ve been busy reading too many books, worrying about my course at Edinburgh next year and fighting off a bad cold (ironic, given the nice weather we’ve been having), and so my earnest efforts to read the entire damn Internet every day have been thwarted. That and the fact I’ve been nervously waiting for, then basking in the glory of, Arsenal’s unbeaten League season - a simply sensational record to achieve. However, coming down from it, I am starting to drift towards the opinion that, great as it is, in the great scheme of things, it is insignificant and perhaps just a fluke. Maybe. But what the hell, it’s still worth a celebration. :-)

A story that warmed my heart. Jeff, a guy selling his Apple Powerbook on eBay, gets contacted by someone offering to pay top price for it, if he uses a dodgy escrow service. An obvious example of escrow fraud (the institution handling the payment is a sham, and the money never gets through). Most people would ignore such a scam, but Jeff heroically decides to send the buyer a custom-built, specially designed P-P-P-Powerbook - or rather, a white ringbinder with keyboard keys glued on. With the encouragement of members of somethingawful, he FedExes the package on to its destination in Colindale, London, where (marvellously), a UK somethingawful member stakes out the guy as he receives the package. And the best thing about it was that the scammer receiving the package had to fork out several hundred to HM Customs & Excise to cover the import duty.

Jeff has written a (lengthy) account of the story so far [PDF], though it’s by no means finished yet… (via MeFi)

Just been watching the very interesting documentary on Channel 4, Fit To Eat, about the quality of hospital food. It concentrated on one factory in Wales supplying ‘food’ to be reheated in hospitals (in-house catering is increasingly rare). In the factory, poor hygiene was rife: workers were not cleaning utensils properly; warm food was left out all day instead of being chilled; food fights took place amongst the staff; workers regularly ate the food in the factory (one even dipped her finger repeatedly in custard, licking it each time then dipping it back again) and showed a total lack of basic food hygiene knowledge (one worker putting frozen peas in his mouth then spitting them back out, claiming frozen food cannot get contaminated). There were (unsurpringly) high levels of a type of E. Coli on the utensils used, while the food itself was low in energy and nutrients (such as Vitamin E) vital to a patient’s recovery. This was contrasted with the lavish receptions and award ceremonies for the Government’s Better Hospital Food initiative, where the catering was of the highest standard. All in all the initiative (recruiting celebrity chefs and the such) seemed to be window dressing, while letting the many private firms quietly rip us off with cheap, nasty hospital food while collecting a tidy sum from the NHS.

The film didn’t down some avenues I’d have liked to see it go down. I’d have loved to find out details about the PFI contract hospital caterers have (PFI contracts tend to be for long periods of time - 10 or 20 years) - on what basis was the contract awarded, who was responsible for signing it and how have they let the caterers get away with it - do hospitals (usually run by the same firm that contracts out the caterers) regularly test or assess the food they receive? Perhaps the dry facts are better left to a book or newspaper investigation, though.

The programme left me angry, and increasingly angry as I write this. Our most vulnerable and needy are being mistreated to the point of malnutrition while those in charge of the services congratulate themselves whilst nibbling vol-au-vents with celebrity chefs. It is absolutely appalling. While food in the NHS historically has not been very good (When my mother was in hospital I used to cook and smuggle food to her, so bad was the hospital dinner), letting private firms do an equally bad job and making a tidy profit makes it no better. Epecially as it now means that as services are in private hands rather than public, so there are fewer means of challenging and changing the system.

It would be good to know about books or journals that have investigated this - George Monbiot’s Captive State and Polly Toynbee’s Hard Work both partly look at the effects of PFI on hospital and school services (not just catering but also things like portering and cleaning) but not with the focus this issue deserves. If anyone knows of any then please mention them in the comments below…

I was going to just linklog this, but it’s so cool it deserves a full writeup - The Top 25 weirdest things you can order from Amazon (via Bifurcated Rivets). The shit on there is amazing.

For example, the 10lb live New England lobster, in case Borough Market is a bit too far away. I doubt it’s particularly kind to the lobster to ship it through the mail, but given you’re going to drop the poor sod alive into a pot of boiling water, comparatively it isn’t that bad.

Other wonderful live things include 9000 ladybirds (at $20, that’s just 0.2c per insect!), for which there can be no other use for apart from immensely evil practical jokes. Ditto for the natural skunk scent.

You don’t have to get live stuff either - you can get Owl Puke as well. Yep, real owl puke. Available new, or used. I dunno how they got the owl puke in the first place, but I bet the chocolate-covered pork rinds had something to do with it.