Alan Le » Miscellaneous

Wolfram|Alpha knows it all!

alan.le — Mon, 18 May 2009 23:23:11 +0000

I’m amazed by a new computational search engine that was launch over the weekend called Wolfram|Alpha. It semantically analyzes search terms and returns interesting computated results.

To give you a sense what’s impressive about Wolfram|Alpha, I’ve listed a sampling of searches and their corresponding results below. You can also watch this introduction video from Stephen Wolfram himself to get a good idea on this search engine.

I’m so enamored by Wolfram|Alpha that I’ve installed a firefox addon that adds Wolfram|Alpha results to Google search results. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12006.

Mashable has a nice collection of Wolfram|Alpha easter eggs. Buzzfeed found that it knows superheroes’ secret identities. Meanwhile, folks on Friendfeed has come up with some really zany searches like: how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?, how many peppers did peter piper pick? and why is the sky blue?

Name search

Genealogic relation Search

City Search

Date Search comparison with Google

Collapsed Freeway Traffic

alan.le — Thu, 17 May 2007 23:45:36 +0000

The traffic around the MacArthur Maze is still really bad due to re-construction of the collapsed freeway. I drove by last night at around 8:30pm and the traffic was still there.

You can see the traffic in the screenshot of the Live Traffic gadget. The MacArthur Maze sits in the center of the map.

An Honest Exception

alan.le — Thu, 17 May 2007 21:54:59 +0000

I was trying to check out the new synth of Gyeongbok Palace on Photosynth and got the following error message. Hey at least they’re honest.