Show us a better way

The UK government have come up with a good idea! Show Us a Better Way is a competition that invites ideas for making better use of public information. These could be for improving health, education, justice or society at large. Some of the ideas already posted are really quite good... The prize fund is worth £20,000!

Tags: government, idea

The last two... for now

Bulgarian and Finnish have been added to the site. Finnish because it is a Scandinavian language after all and was missed off previously (oops!) and Bulgarian in honour of the ex-national player who comes to our little London volleyball meet-ups. Tenuous, but a good enough reason for us.

Related: language, Finnish, Bulgarian

Twitter Watch 2

A new version of Twitter Watch is out. The main improvement on the original is that the live feed of tweets can now be translated into a selection of languages. There are a lot of Twitter users who don't write in English!

South west London volleyball

Here's a clip of our (almost) weekly session in the park. Should've hit the final spike a bit harder...

Tags: volleyball

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Four more countries added

We added a few more languages the other day and now here are four more, namely; Croatian, Czech, Polish and Romanian. Incidentally they're also competing in Euro 2008 at the moment. Czech Republic beat Germany today so congratulations to them!

Related: language

Hello Scandinavia and India

Greek and Dutch were added a few weeks ago, now Nimisis.com is also available in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Hindi. That makes 18 languages all together so far!

See also: language, swedish, norwegian, danish, hindi

The final frontier

Today's theme is Space. The European Space Agency has started accepting applications for wannabe astronauts. To apply you need to have a science related degree, preferrably be aged 27 to 37 and also have passed the kind of medical private pilots need (which costs about £150). Why not get out of the rat race and into the space race? Flights won't start until around 2015 though.

If you really want to go into space but don't get selected you could still become a space tourist. Tickets start at around £100K - I'd be annoyed if I didn't get a window seat. Here's more info about the industry in a TED talk by Burt Rutan.
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Tags: space, exploration, TED talks, astronaut

Shorter than TinyURL

URL shorteners create short links that forward onto web addresses that are long and hard to remember. Omani.ac is the shortest URL shortener I've come across. Bookmark it and use it when you're emailing a long web address to a friend or posting a link on a site.

There's also an API that programmers might find useful. Twitter, for example, automatically substitutes links that are thirty or more characters long. Perhaps you'll be able to find a use for it!

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