To celebrate Halloween, last year we discussed what you can do with 1,818 pounds of pumpkin. It was a popular blog post, and it put an awful lot of smiles on peoples’ faces. An entire lamina (filled shape) of smiles, in fact. More »
We’re huge library fans here at Wolfram|Alpha. We proudly count a number of former librarians and library science experts among our ranks, and we rely heavily on contacts at public and academic libraries for expert assistance in locating sources and answering difficult questions across a wide range of knowledge areas. So we hope that, like us, you’ve been celebrating National Friends of Libraries Week (October 21–27) the past few days. More »
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Today is National Mole Day. Unlike most of Wolfram|Alpha’s team I’m not a scientist, so if you’re curious to learn what the day is about, so am I—we can learn together! Thankfully, Wolfram|Alpha is a great tool for learning pretty much anything.
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Wolfram|Alpha answers millions of queries every day. For instance:
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This is an edited version of a short talk I gave last weekend at The Nantucket Project—a fascinatingly eclectic event held on an island that I happen to have been visiting every summer for the past dozen years.
Lots of things have happened in the world in the past 100 years. But I think in the long view of history one thing will end up standing out among all others: this has been the century when the idea of computation emerged. More »
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First, my apologies: I didn’t quite follow through on my promise of a regular series of blog posts about American Community Survey data in Wolfram|Alpha. But when you’re trying to ingest all the world’s systematic knowledge… well, there’s a lot of competition for the top spot on your to-do list. So to make up for lost time, I’ll cover the remaining clusters of ACS data that you can currently explore in Wolfram|Alpha: education and income. More »
Today is World Teachers’ Day, and our recent blog post about Wolfram|Alpha in the classroom inspired me, so I thought I’d share how I used Wolfram|Alpha when I was an English as a second language (ESL) teacher in Korea. More »
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What do the following two math problems have in common?
- If I have 12 apples, and Jane has 7, and then Jane gives 2 apples to me, how many more apples do I have than Jane?
- (12 + 2) – (7 – 2)
Answer: two things, actually. More »
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Last weekend, Looper came out in theaters, bringing time travel back to the big screen. But there are lot of questions that can be asked about the science of the world it portrays. We will visit some minor spoilers along the way, so you may want to wait to read this post until you see the movie. In addition to time travel, Looper depicts widespread solar power and almost ubiquitous telekinesis. What can Wolfram|Alpha tell us about this and other aspects of the film? More »