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Note added: Since this blog was written, Facebook has modified their API to make much less information available about Facebook friends. While I think adding privacy controls is a good idea, what Facebook has done reduces the richness of the results that Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics can give for Facebook users.
After I wrote about doing personal analytics with data I’ve collected about myself, many people asked how they could do similar things themselves.
Now of course most people haven’t been doing the kind of data collecting that I’ve been doing for the past couple of decades. But these days a lot of people do have a rich source of data about themselves: their Facebook histories. More »
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While Wolfram|Alpha can do many sorts of computations, mathematical calculations are one of its particular specialties. In fact, using the power of Mathematica‘s computational capabilities under the hood, Wolfram|Alpha can do many things, ranging from the very simple to the fiendishly complicated, with mathematical functions. More »
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In a previous post, I discussed Wolfram|Alpha’s facility with probability distributions, such as the distribution of probability among the possible totals that can be shown with a pair of fair dice: More »
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Like many people, I went to see Total Recall recently. Much of the story for this science fiction thriller (based loosely on a short story by Philip K. Dick) concerns “The Fall.” As explained in the introduction for the movie, “The Fall” is a tunnel bored through the center of the Earth that connects the fictional United Federation of Britain and The Colony, which is located in present day Australia. More »
August 8 is “National Dollar Day,” commemorating the establishment of the US monetary system on this day in 1786. But the first dollar bill wasn’t issued until 1862—and instead of George Washington, it featured a portrait of Salmon P. Chase, then Secretary of the Treasury under President Lincoln (and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court). More »
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Today we are introducing our new Clip ’n Share feature. Wolfram|Alpha users can now easily share individual result pods on their favorite social networks.
When you hover over a result pod, an icon tray featuring Wolfram|Alpha Pro functionality will appear. The brand new Clip ‘n Share feature, which is free and easy for anyone to use, is now included at the end of the icon list. More »
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Imagine you want to send a one-ton package to Mars, land it safely on the surface, and have it move around after it lands. First, the package has to survive atmospheric entry on Mars, which heats the package to 1,600 degrees. After this, the package has to deploy a supersonic parachute capable of withstanding 9 gs of force to slow down. More »