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wolfram alpha

Friday Funny: Wolfram Alpha Ngrmadlcy

by Nik on May 22, 2009

in Humor

I have two items for you on this Friday before the long Memorial Day weekend.

First up, if your Windows PC presents a screen like this photo I found on Ask The Admin when you try to start it up, something isn’t right.  But if you look a bit closer you’ll see that it’s really quite a bit more abnormal than it appears.  Or should I say, abngrmadl?

Start Wandows Ngrmadly

Start Wandows Ngrmadly

Second, Something Awful took Wolfram Alpha for a spin this week, just like the rest of us, with some humorously informative queries.  Humorous because they start off by asking what portion of the US Gross National Product is represented by the film Ernest Goes to Camp and just get stranger from there, and informative because they illustrate the sort of data sets Wolfram Alpha has access to.  Fair warning: Something Awful contains material of questionable taste and may not always be appropriate for work or children.  There’s nothing too awful in this one, though.  You can read the complete story here.

Ernest Goes to Camp as a percentage of the US Gross National Product

Ernest Goes to Camp as a percentage of the US Gross National Product

Have a great weekend, everybody!

Wolfram Alpha: Smarter Than You

by Nik on May 19, 2009

in News

The Information Age is upon us.  The barriers to publication have been removed, and the information storage density increases of the last half century mean that we’re able to generate and store an incredible amount of data.  The Encyclopedia Britannica, one of the largest English language printed encyclopedias, has about 40 million words in 32 volumes. That requires a considerably sturdy bookshelf to contain.  Stored digitally in plain text it might consume about a quarter of the capacity of a 1 GB memory card in your camera, which is smaller than a postage stamp.  Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is at least an order of magnitude larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Read the full article →