Wolfram Alpha
Has anyone had a look at WolframAlpha yet? I’ve just had a look at the intro video, and in a geeky way it looks like it should be amazing! The goal is to “make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone”. It’s in very early stages on first look seems groundbreaking.
Despite its search style functionality, it’s not actually a search engine. It’s a “computational knowledge engine”, which uses its internal knowledge base rather than searching the web. The variety of information is vast; nutritional information, geographical facts and figures, comparisons, financial info. The list goes on. It’s easy to see what a difference this will make once this really gets going. Mundane and hard to find facts will be there at our fingertips. No more sieving through countless links on Google. AQA will be left to deal with the stupid questions like “is that barman single” or “what should I call my dog”.
Try typing in your birthday. You’ll then know exactly how many days and seconds you have been in existence. (Although it did say “no known major notable events” for my birth date, so it obviously has a long way to go).
Go and have a gander. Prizes for the most interesting random fact! (or not)