My favourite thing about WolframAlpha (so far)

[brin_bellway]

is the way it gives exactly zero fucks about mixed units. As an MSL (metric as a second language) bilingual, it's so nice to be able to just code-switch at it.

Me: "Hey, if gasoline costs 95.3 cents per litre and my car gets 22 miles per gallon, how much does it cost to drive 42 kilometres?"

WolframAlpha, not batting an eye: "$4.28."

Me: "Thank you!"

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Anyone else have any favourite things about WolframAlpha they want to talk about? I haven't used it for all that many different things, so there's probably lots of great bits I haven't discovered or appreciated.

Comments

[kleptoquark]

The Unix command line utility "units" is a masterpiece and I don't know how I ever survived without it, by the way. There's also gutcalc.com if you want to set c=hbar=1, it will happily convert grams to hertz.

[yvannairie]

That's actually beautiful :Dc Clever writing on their part on how variables are handled.

[contrarianarchon]

Honestly, I remember having a bunch of trouble getting it to do this? It was something stupid like rock densities or something, but all the unit shenanigans just utterly failed to parse. When it does work, it's sublime, but I apparently don't ask it questions in ways it can parse.

[youzicha]

This is also my favorite thing about it, but I also like how it has a large database of various constants, so you can type things like "(specific heat of vaporization of water) * (volume of an olympic swimming pool) * (density of water) / 400 MW" and it tells you "3.74 hours". (That's something from my web browser history, I think it was prompted by some Hacker News discussion about passively managing the waste heat from a scrammed nuclear reactor.)