Re: Re: Are you wolfing tonight?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg100012] Re: [mg99956] Re: [mg99939] Are you wolfing tonight?
- From: "David Park" <djmpark at comcast.net>
- Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 00:18:01 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <200905191101.HAA07313@smc.vnet.net> <24152206.1242812031471.JavaMail.root@n11>
Yes, for most things Wolfram Alpha is thin gruel. I wanted to get the increase in budgets of Hoover vs. Roosevelt and it didn't understand the question. I asked for U.S. Budget 1928 - 1932 and there was no data. I asked for U.S. Inflation History and all I got was thin gruel, which was also incorrect because W|A forgot to multiply by 100 to get percent. But when I looked up 'inflation' in Wikipedia I quickly obtained a graph of U.S. inflation and deflation from the 1600's to the present. What W|A is better at is scientific data. What it is best at is doing Mathematica calculations. So, essentially WRI is giving the super calculator aspects of Mathematica away for free. For me, this raises the question: Why doesn't WRI give away Mathematica PlayerPro for free, and make it easy to obtain and install? Then anyone could read a dynamic Mathematica notebook, just as anyone can read a PDF document with Acrobat Reader. Nothing would do more to promote sales of the full Mathematica and it would be a real service to science in promoting greatly improved scientific and technical communication. David Park djmpark at comcast.net http://home.comcast.net/~djmpark/ From: J=E1nos L=F6bb [mailto:janos.lobb at yale.edu] On May 19, 2009, at 7:01 AM, magma wrote: > Are you wolfing tonight? > Not yet the title of a new pop song, but wolfing (or walphing) is the > new thing to do on the net. Not necessarily lonesome. > > Wolfram|Alpha went live in test mode at 8:48pm CST on Friday 15th May. > While its fictional "city" cousin HAL comes from Urbana, W/A is > perhaps more "rural" coming from Champaign :-) > It can't yet play chess and hasn't killed anybody yet, but it's > nevertheless a killer app. Yes, it is a killer app. It kills itself !! Just type into it "Ampere's law" and watch what do you get. Or, if You do not want to bother yourself with such bagatelle, type in: "Map of lung cancer in Connecticut" and see what is unfolding. J=E1nos P.S. Of course if I type the same in Google, I am getting something.
- References:
- Are you wolfing tonight?
- From: magma <maderri2@gmail.com>
- Are you wolfing tonight?