Wolfram Alpha is Not a Search Engine–but a massive calculation tool!
This is without a doubt one of the most intriguing sites you will experience on the internet, but you won’t know it at first glance. When you first enter, you’ll just see a simple search box that prompts you “Enter what you want to Calculate or Know about:
So do it at: http://www.wolframalpha.com/
AND LET YOUR TRIP DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE BEGIN!
Wolfram Alpha says that their long term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. They aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Their goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries…
HUH? WHAT?
Well in Blonde speak: They have a tool which you can use to find out the numbers and facts behind just about anything for which you might need data. Okay–Here’s an example.
You are madly shoving a chocolate chip cookie into your mouth (for the 4th time today). And suddenly you stop yourself and think “Man, maybe this is why my big fat butt behind keeps growing. I wonder how many calories is in this cookie?” Well just enter that into the box on Wolfram Alpha, ‘Chocolate chip cookie’. Sit back and get ready…. everything you wanted to know about “Chocolate chip cookies” will soon appear. Every nutritional fact you could ever want to know–71 calories…hmm, not so bad! So now you are thinking–“Well I ate 4 of these things…”. So put that into the search engine, ‘4 Chocolate chip cookies’. It then calculates the nutritional facts for 4 cookies–ugh! 285 calories–a skinny babe’s lunch.
If you want to get further in the groove, they provide you with plenty of examples to get you going here:
New to Wolfram|Alpha?
A few things to try:
- enter any date (e.g. a birth date)june 23, 1988
- enter any city (e.g. a home town)new york
- enter any two stocks
IBM Apple - enter any calculation
$250 + 15% - enter any math formula
x^2 sin(x) - enter any two first names
andrew, barbara - enter any food
1 apple + 2 oranges - enter any chemical formula
H2SO4 - enter any musical notes
C Eb G C - more »
Chief Blonde Remarks: Wonderful Wonderful Wonderful! Useful and Useless bits of knowledge for your everyday life and your astro-physics world (if you have one of those). You will put Wolfram Alpha on your toolbar as a bookmark after the first use. Scary how much it already knows. Incredible how much more they will be adding over the decade. This may be the first time you have heard of Wolfram Alpha. It won’t be the last. This baby is POWERFUL, and they have hundreds of widgets available for you bloggers! They have a blog so you can follow their updates in your Reader. Go ahead. Try it now. You may never come out of that Rabbit Hole again!
TELL ME WHAT YOU TRIED!
