Wolfram Alpha. Fail?
1. It can't answer, with any degreee of precision, "How much wood could a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"
2. All of the answers are pictures. This means you can't cut and paste in any useful sense. Probably good for 9th graders trying to write a report. Bad for other things.
3. The Matt pointed out this "synonym network" for "homosexuality:"
I don't understand it either.
I think #2 is the more interesting part of Wolfram Alpha. I mean, why? Yes, there is a lot of graphical stuff, but there is also a lot of non-graphical stuff. It wouldn't be that hard to write a set of routines that rendered it in HTML. The only reasons I can come up with basically revolve around "Our data is soooo especialle that we need to keep it safe." Odd.
2. All of the answers are pictures. This means you can't cut and paste in any useful sense. Probably good for 9th graders trying to write a report. Bad for other things.
3. The Matt pointed out this "synonym network" for "homosexuality:"
I don't understand it either.
I think #2 is the more interesting part of Wolfram Alpha. I mean, why? Yes, there is a lot of graphical stuff, but there is also a lot of non-graphical stuff. It wouldn't be that hard to write a set of routines that rendered it in HTML. The only reasons I can come up with basically revolve around "Our data is soooo especialle that we need to keep it safe." Odd.
posted by MJH at 7:49 PM
1 Comments:
I've had some fun playing with it, but I don't expect to us it anytime soon in place of my old favorites, Google Web Search, Google News Search, and Google Blog Search. My high-tech sons and my engineer brother might use it more than I will.
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