Wait, It's not one of the new transformers? argh..
Wolfram Alpha. The first time I heard it, I thought to myself, “Maybe it’s Optimus Prime‘s older brother? Or wait, is there a sequel on the horizon?”
Regardless of how you feel about the transformers movie (with or without megan fox’s involvement), Wolfram Alpha is something cool that will impress your boss/mom/future wife or husband.
Known as a “computational knowledge engine,” Wolfram Alpha is kindof like a search engine (a webpage with a box where you enter a query and results are returned) that does something inherently different — instead of displaying a bunch of web sites, it gives you the answer.
So, no, it’s not Google.
For example, if you enter in your hometown (say, Perrysburg, Ohio), instead of getting back a link to Wikipedia or some map, the city’s population, local time, current weather forecast, elevation, and local major cities are displayed, with no clicking around to find the information. pretty cool.
For those of you who are into math, that’s what Wolfram Alpha likes, too. Enter any formula, and you’ll get a crazy awesome result set computed by Wolfram Mathematica.
We techies like to build useful applications, but what’s the fun in having the power to code if you can’t also build in a few easter eggs? Wolfram Alpha is not exempt from this overarching theme… seeing as that if you ask it “How many roads must a man walk before you can call him a man?” – it responds – “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind (according to Bob Dylan).
What a smart calculator.
And Facebook’s Pirate English is no exception… according to 