## Friday, May 15, 2009 ... //

### Wolfram|Alpha starts tonight

Unless a small snag with a non-linear behavior of the throughput will become a big snag, Wolfram|Alpha (click!) will be activated tonight, at 8 p.m. Boston Summer Time (Saturday 2 a.m. Prague Summer Time). A webcast is ready. What I recommend you to see already now is this:

Screencast (detailed visual examples of search/knowledge/computation queries)
These examples are enough to amaze me. Also, see all TRF articles about Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Alpha blog.

Saturday: running

The gadget is now running. Well, I am obviously not going to complain that WA doesn't find Swedish blondes or define basic words because this is not what this engine was created for. Some people still haven't understood what it is. Here are some queries I did which show that it will be helpful for me:
Complex number multiplications
zeta function
area of a particular sphere
triangle with 3 particular vertices in 3D
order of the monster group
completing our recent recursion relation
melting point of wolfram
voltage, current (numbers)
this blog's URL
President of Czechia
President of Czechoslovakia in 1990
Velvet Revolution date
Pilsen
Weather in Pilsen
next solar eclipse in Pilsen
Weather on 9/11/2001 where I was
current time in London
Distance between two cities
location of Hubble
compare two countries
linear regression of my geological warming
... check: base two
calories in beer
carbon dioxide
density of 3 metals
Sexmission
Newton vs Leibniz
meaning of life
Of course, I have gotten a lot of expected "We don't know what to do" as well as "Holy Cow, dear Dave, we're overloaded" messages and some errors, for example wrong minus signs in the speeds of wind and temperatures.

The long-term economic data (GDPs etc.) tend to be obsolete (2005-6) while the traded numbers are fresh.

Also, Czechoslovakia had to be retroactively renamed as the Czech Republic: I don't mind - our Slovak brothers may. :-) Global mean temperature was 27 °C instead of 14.5 °C - a lot of warming haha.