Friday, May 22, 2009

Wolframalpha, I'm Unconvinced

Wolframalpha is supposed to be this new, wow, awesome calculator. I'm unconvinced. The data it draws from is very incomplete. 210 million English Speakers in the US? Really? 90 million US residents don't speak English? Says who? Can't tell me how many people are diagnosed with type II diabetes by country, but only wants to give me mortality rates? Oh well.

It DOES do a few cool things, mathematically. I never would have gotten a D in Calc III in 1985 at RHIT if I had this calculator. Differential Equations II would have been alot easier with this library. Kids now a days have things so much better, educationally, in so many ways than I did (remember microfiche?!? And 5-1/4 floppy disks that held a whole 512K??)

Mortgage monthly payments are easily / quickly calculated.

So it's good for some things I guess. Also, very repulsively egotistical that it's not named after Tungsten, but rather, after inventor Stephen Wolfram. Ugh.

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