Wolfram Alpha (google on steroids)

[derekmcd]

It just came online yesterday. Pretty handy for some quick references and calculations. It seems to be pretty robust.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Give it a whirl.

 

[centsworth_II]

Maybe Wolfram Alpha does some things better than Google, but when I entered "citric acid cycle" I got nothing. Google gave me tons of references.

Edit: Interesting. Tried "citric acid cycle" again and again got nothing. Then I noticed a "search the web" option at the bottom of the page. Using this I got..... Google! :lol:

 

[SpeedFreek]

I've been testing this out and I like it!

The relativity and astrophysics sections are really cool.. now I have an easy way to find out the hubble parameter at any given time or redshift, which is very useful indeed!

So, it seems that 1 hour after the big bang, our observable universe had a radius of 529 light years!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+ ... e+big+bang

Or, if you want to know where the ISS or HST is, right now:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=In ... ce+Station

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Hu ... +Telescope

Or, to calculate relativistic time dilation:

At a certain speed, say 0.866c - http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ti ... on+0.866+c

Or to calculate the relativistic speed at which you get a certain time dilation: Click Here

:lol:

 

[DrRocket]

I've been testing this out and I like it!

The relativity and astrophysics sections are really cool.. now I have an easy way to find out the hubble parameter at any given time or redshift, which is very useful indeed!

So, it seems that 1 hour after the big bang, our observable universe had a radius of 529 light years!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+ ... e+big+bang

Or, if you want to know where the ISS or HST is, right now:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=In ... ce+Station

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Hu ... +Telescope

Or, to calculate relativistic time dilation:

At a certain speed, say 0.866c - http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ti ... on+0.866+c

Or to calculate the relativistic speed at which you get a certain time dilation: Click Here

:lol:

I am still leery. I tried a few questions and got nothing but ""Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input"

I am also skittish about using it to get scientific answers that are not easily checkable. The Wolfram mathworld site has so far been pretty good, but Stephen Wolfram is the author of a self-published book called "A New Kind of Science" that is full of misconceptions and misrepresentations. It has been reviewed by scientists numerous times and pretty universally panned. http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~eclark/ANKOS_reviews.html This particular review from that collection is by an expert in cellular automata, which is the heart of Wolfram's book, and the review is as scathing as most of the reviews of the book. http://www.ams.org/notices/200302/fea-gray.pdf

So basically I don't trust his product to produce good data without a chaperon.

 

[SpeedFreek]

I did, of course, test it with questions I already knew the answers to, and it gave the correct answers. I figure that once I tested it across a range of known values for a certain problem (like the angular size distance of the observable universe for a given redshift) I could trust it for the values in between.

 

[DrRocket]

I did, of course, test it with questions I already knew the answers to, and it gave the correct answers. I figure that once I tested it across a range of known values for a certain problem (like the angular size distance of the observable universe for a given redshift) I could trust it for the values in between.

I imagine if you are using it as an interpolation machine between known points that there is little danger.

That rather like killing a gnat with a sledge hammer. But the gnat will probably die.

 

[SpeedFreek]

You might be able to kill that gnat with a cocktail stick (or perhaps with a glance!), but some of us need that sledgehammer! :mrgreen:

 

[apache2]

Anyone know what font is used to display the numbers etc on the wolfram|alpha website?? I quite like it.