Wolfram’s Alpha - a computational knowledge engine

Wolfram's Alpha is quite amazing. It's like Google on steroids, and then some.

Try entering things in the search box like:

• Your birthday (I learned that I was also Born on a Blue Day — a Wednesday)
• The city (or country) where you live (I learned that Singapore's Gini Coefficient at 0.522 is much worse than Australia's at 0.305)
• A musical scale (I entered my favorite key, D minor, and it indicated the key signature, notes and what keys to play on the piano, but neglected to raise the leading note, C#)
• And of course, since Wolfram is the developer of Mathematica, it does a good job of doing math problems. I entered "integral x^5" and it gave the answer, drew a graph of the integral and even showed the steps for the solution.

There may be a new search verb for this. Mike Croucher over at Walking Randomly has coined the new word "walpha", as in "do a walpha search on the Airbus 380". Let's see if it catches on.

Go here for a bunch of example searches in Wolfram's Alpha.

The home page: Wolfram's Alpha.

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