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With Halloween around the corner, everyone’s thinking about costumes, trick-or-treating, and jack-o’-lantern carving and figuring out what to do with a 1,818 pound pumpkin. While the latter might only be true for the owners of this year’s largest pumpkin, Wolfram|Alpha has something for everyone this Halloween. The nearly one-ton squash belongs to a farmer from Quebec, Canada. Besides carving it into a giant jack-o’-lantern, the next best thing to do with that much pumpkin is make enough pumpkin pie for a small town. A common recipe for a pumpkin pie calls for two cups of pumpkin. Using Wolfram|Alpha, we find that 1,818 pounds of pumpkin will allow us to make 3,550 pumpkin pies.
Hopefully you are in a giving mood, so you can cut each pie into eight slices to come up with just enough to share with the entire town of Allen Park, Michigan. With 28,210 people in Allen Park and 28,400 slices of pie, you’re still left with 190 slices to put in the freezer for later.
What if we combined all of those pies into one big pumpkin pie and covered it in whipped cream?
Note that those numbers are shown in kilograms and not the typical grams.
We’ve blogged in the past about comparing fun-size candy bars to the full-size treats. Query “1 fun size Snickers bar versus 1 Snickers bar” to compare different sizes of the same candy. You can also compare multiple fun-size candies to one full-size candy:
After a weekend full of candy adventures, it’s time to assess the damages. On your next trip to the dentist, be sure to use Wolfram|Alpha to help you better understand what the heck your dentist is talking about when he says your kid has a cavity in her “primary left mandibular second molar”. Wolfram|Alpha has handy information on things you always wanted to know about teeth. For example, you can query a particular tooth in the universal, US, or FDI two-digit system, such as “tooth 5” or “tooth 18”. In each case, the “Designations” pod immediately presents the corresponding notations in other standard systems. In case you’ve always wondered why you had that particular tooth, the “basic function” attribute immediately elucidates each tooth’s role in the consumption of your favorite foods. Also quite handy is a quick summary of the lifetime of the tooth, which is presented as major “Developmental milestones”. You can even be very specific about such information. Just ask “when does tooth ML^3 erupt?” or, more colloquially, “when do primary canines erupt?”.
So the next time you are at the dentist with your young kids and want to quickly visually identify your child’s teeth, just type in “primary teeth”, and this will return a list of all the teeth in your child’s mouth. Or you can simply query about a specific tooth you’re interested in, such as “primary second molar”. As always, we hope that our work on Wolfram|Alpha makes understanding your bodies and your surroundings a little easier.
In keeping with the Halloween theme, you can also explore the history of Halloween-themed words. Using Wolfram|Alpha, you’ll find that “Halloween” first showed up in the English language in the mid-1700s and has picked up popularity in the last 30 years:
Take a look at the word frequency history for “zombie” and “mummy”, too.
Happy Halloween from the Wolfram|Alpha team!