The Wolfram|Alpha front page has “gone back to the drawing board!” We are excited to unveil the redesigned Wolfram|Alpha front page, filled with interactive, hand-drawn sketches that offer a brand new way to interact and learn with Wolfram|Alpha.
We’ve gone through our Examples page and illustrated some of our favorite queries to provide our users with a brand new way to experience Wolfram|Alpha and learn interesting facts. Each of the nearly 300 custom sketches refers to just one example taken from Wolfram|Alpha’s vast knowledge base, and clicking one will take you directly to a corresponding results page. This not only allows visitors to easily explore a wide variety of knowledge, but it also acts as an interactive starting point for those looking to learn more about the answers Wolfram|Alpha can provide.
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Today is the summer solstice—when the Sun is at its more northern point—which marks the first day of summer, as well as the longest day in 2012. It’s a great day to go outside and take advantage of all the extra sunlight, and also a good time to take a look at all of the computations Wolfram|Alpha can do revolving around the Sun.
Here in Champaign, Illinois, the sun rose at 5:25am this morning, with sunset happening at 8:27pm. This equals just over 15 hours of sunlight:
May 20–22 has held many major milestones in the history of aviation. Charles Lindbergh began the world’s first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean on May 20, 1927 (and completed it one day later). Just five years after that on May 21, 1932, Amelia Earhart began her one-day journey across the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, those moments wouldn’t have been possible without the Wright Brothers patenting their airplane on May 22, 1906.
We’ve blogged in the past about the aviation functionality that Wolfram|Alpha knows. The query “flights overhead” is quite popular, but it only scratches the surface of what we can do.
While your friends or family are preparing to drive to the airport to pick you up, give them the name of your airline and flight number, and they can track exactly where you are in the air. Plus, they’ll see details on the scheduled departure and landing, actual departure and landing, air speed, altitude, and more.
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For the past few years, Wolfram Research has supported Bike to Work Day by handing out fruit, water, snacks, and other items to bikers at a station right outside our headquarters in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. This year we decided to include some data about biking to work alongside the granola bars and bananas.
If you live in a bike-friendly area, you can save quite a bit of money each year by occasionally biking to work. Using the widget below, you can enter your daily commute in miles, how many days of the week for how many weeks of the year you expect to bike to work, and the MPG of your car and your city to determine how much money you can save.
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For hundreds of years, scholars have carefully studied the plays of Shakespeare, breaking down the language and carefully dissecting every act and scene. We thought it would be interesting to see what sorts of computational insights Wolfram|Alpha could provide, so we uploaded the complete catalog of Shakespeare’s plays into our database. This allows our users to examine Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, and the rest of the Bard’s plays in an entirely new way. More »
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The latest version of our Wolfram|Alpha App for iOS just hit the iTunes App Store, and it comes with some exciting new features! Alongside visual upgrades to weather queries and the addition of links to purchase consumer products directly from Best Buy comes the biggest upgrade to our mobile app yet: using images as input.
With an in-app purchase of $0.99 comes the ability to use photos from your Camera Roll or pictures taken on the fly and input them directly into Wolfram|Alpha. Wolfram|Alpha can then provide analysis of your photo, add filters, detect features, perform color processing, and apply image effects. More »
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In continuing our goal to create “An App for Every Course, and More”, we are happy to announce the latest in our Course Assistant series of iOS apps: the Wolfram Linear Algebra Course Assistant. Powered by Wolfram|Alpha, the Wolfram Linear Algebra Course Assistant will help you work your way through homework problems, ace your tests, and gain a better understanding of linear algebra concepts!
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Most of our users are aware that we release a new version of Wolfram|Alpha every week. Each version includes countless changes—including regular data updates to hundreds of sources, improvements to our natural-language parser and other core frameworks, and completely new areas of coverage. More »
One year ago this week we sent out our first Wolfram Fun Fact! Since then, we have tweeted nearly 200 Wolfram|Alpha-computed facts, gained over 10,000 followers, and received some pretty amazing submissions from those followers.
To celebrate our first birthday, we thought we would share some of our favorite and most popular Wolfram Fun Facts from the past year:
round(log_12(vitaminC in a cubic light year of coffee/kg)))= meaning of lifehttp://bit.ly/hl98zt #FunFact— Wolfram Fun Facts (@WolframFunFacts)March 16, 2011
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If you paid any attention to last weekend’s NFL games, you know that we’re headed for another Patriots versus Giants Super Bowl. We’ll take a closer look at those two teams next week, including prior matchups, head-to-head player comparisons, and performance trends over the past few months. But while we’ve got a slight breather in the NFL schedule, we wanted to show you a few ways you can use Wolfram|Alpha to uncover interesting stats from the 2011 NFL season (and beyond).
The Indianapolis Colts turned from a possible playoff contender to a team just hoping to win a game after quarterback Peyton Manning was ruled out for the year. Manning’s absence was a big reason why the Colts’ offense had a hard time scoring points. This bar graph clearly shows the Colts having the lowest point production since 1993.
