brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
Brin ([personal profile] brin_bellway) wrote2019-01-23 10:12 am

My favourite thing about WolframAlpha (so far)

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.
youzicha: (Default)

[personal profile] youzicha 2019-01-25 04:46 pm (UTC)(link)
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.)