Wolfram|Alpha

I believe I witnessed history tonight. Spending your Friday night on the web watching a new web service launch is geeky even by my standards but this was special. Wolfram|Alpha is a new kind of tool it doesn’t search the web and bring you pages like Google does it computes the answer to a question.

Ask about a city and it gives population, map current time and weather and a map.  Ask about a petroleum and it gives the chemical formula the flash point the density and the chemical identifiers. Enter a date and you know how many days, months, years ago it was and what phase the moon was in but what major events happened. Turns out nothing of interest happened on the day of my birth but maybe that was just an oversight  it’s just hours old after all. Ask about Xerox it will tell you all kinds of stock related info that I don’t understand (charts and graphs included)  and that it has 57,000 employees and it’s based in Stamford Conn.

But the real advantage will come for engineers,  mathematicians, I just figured a 30year 5.5% mortgage on $150,ooo This a very powerful tool