WolframAlpha: Second Impressions

After I took out some of my aggression on WolframAlpha a couple weeks ago (and managed to misspell “Stephen Wolfram” and not even notice until now), I’ve decided to somewhat revise my statements.

While WolframAlpha is still nothing special, I’ve been using it pretty much every day. It’s sort of a replacement for my calculator, much in the way Google was. I used to do, for example, physics problem sets and type basic equations into Google, like . WolframAlpha has filled this role because it can do things like take and find roots.

It can even somtimes surprise you with its abilities:

Not bad

So the moral of the story is that WolframAlpha isn’t all bad; we sciency-types can still find it somewhat useful.

In other news, wasn’t Google Squared supposed to be out by now?

WolframAlpha: First Impressions

I’m writing this on launch day, so I’m not sure how well the following statements apply to the WolframAlpha we will know when this launch business is over. Also, I stopped watching the webcast several hours ago because, frankly, I’ve heard enough of Stephen Wolfram telling us how cool he is.

No one fucking cares

I have to say that I find WolframAlpha, in its current incarnation, rather disappointing. Certainly it has some cool capabilities; I can find out how long it would take me to drive to jupiter with the query:

• (distance from earth to planet jupiter) / 60mph

What’s disappointing is that the following queries do not work:

• (distance from earth to jupiter) / 60mph
• time it would take to travel from earth to jupiter at 60mph

etc. In fact, my first-ever WolframAlpha query, average quantity of beer consumed by a US male in 1985, left me empty-handed, so to speak. Now given WolframAlpha’s design, it’s not surprising that this information was lacking. Why in fuck would anyone ever bother to enter that sort of data into Wolfram’s database?

But that’s just it! That’s exactly the sort of weird fucking information that a search engine like Google can find, and presumably will be found by Google squared. In the end, Wolfram’s own little 10TB database can never compete with the massive amount of information available on the web.

That’s where semantic parsing comes in, and is another area where WolframAlpha underperforms. It can handle a simple question like

• What is the GDP of France?

because it recognizes that “what”, “is”, “the”, and “of” are all unnecessary words. But, similar to my previous example,

• time it would take to traverse the milky way at 100mph

produces no results. Why is this? All the data is there: diameter of the milky way, 100mph, and division. The only thing that’s failing is the engine’s ability to parse the question I wrote. The answer is ~1 trillion years, by the way.

But maybe I’m being unfair. How about something simpler? GDP of US, Europe works fine, but GDP of US compared to Europe does not (and for the grammar-inclined, GDP of US compared to that of Europe also fails).

In fact, the only really impressive capabilities I’ve seen are those relating to mathematics, and those are far inferior to Wolfram’s already-existing Mathematica.

Killer Toothpaste

I am writing this post in order to warn fellow members of society that using Colgate’s Whitening with Oxygen Bubbles Brisk Mint presents a greater danger to your health than not brushing your teeth at all. I bought this toothpase out of curiosity; what does toothpaste need oxygen bubbles for? Who knows! What an adventure! Or so I thought…

I did a Google search to find the answer to this question, but instead found numerous reviews describing pain and suffering resulting from this toothpaste. Sissies, I thought, a little burn helps kill the germs. I’m afraid to say that I am now one of those sissies.

After about two days of using the oxygen-bubbled toothpaste I developed an extremely painful soreness in my throat. I thought for a while that it was an unrelated illness, but remembering the reviews online I decided to try using a different toothpaste for a few days.

Not 24 hours after ceasing to use the oxygen bubble toothpaste the soreness had almost entirely vanished. I may be a fan of Colgate in general, but this is one product I will never ever buy again.