If you haven’t heard of Wolfram|Alpha, then you’ve missed out on one of the most amazing sites on the Internet. This is one of the most useful sites around. It is part encyclopaedia, part search engine and part calculator. You can feed it a whole range of queries, and it’ll come up with exact answers for you, without you having to trawl through results looking for a suitable one yourself.

Having a problem with your calculus homework? Feed it into Wolfram|Alpha for an instant answer. Doing a crossword and want to know which words end with “ager”? Wolfram|Alpha to the rescue. On a diet and want to know the nutritional value of those 10 peanut M&Ms you’ve rationed for yourself for today? Look no further than Wolfram|Alpha.

There’s just so much that the site can do that it boggles the mind.

The site has a great tour that shows you its basic functions. Here are five cool things you can do with it.

1. Ever wondered what a number looked like in Cuneiform (ancient Babylonian)? Or Mayan if you like? Wolfram|Alpha can do this for you. And it will also show you what the result looks like on a Japanese abacus. It might not be strictly useful, but how amazing is that!

2. If you’re a Scrabble maniac, the site will help you calculate the score for any word you want to play. Just type in ‘Scrabble score vivacious’, for example, and it will tell you this word is worth 17 points.

3. Translate anything to Morse code. You never know when Morse code might come in handy. A quick search tells me that ‘… — …’ is SOS in Morse code.

4. Find the distance between two places. Doing a quick search of the distance between Coonoor and Chennai, the site tells me that an airplane will take 26 minutes to travel this distance, light in vacuum will take one millisecond and sound will take 19 minutes to travel the 387.3 kilometres between the two cities.

5. Map your friends graph on Facebook. You can connect Wolfram|Alpha to your Facebook and map exactly how all your friends are connected to each other. It will also map where all your friends are based, what you talk about the most on Facebook and when you use it as well.

Do check out the site and let me know what you think.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Features> MetroPlus / by Anshuman Rane / Chennai – April 12th, 2016