It doesn’t understand “golden retriever” but orange juice and cheese, hell yeah. Would I like to supersize that?
Computer-generated list of quasi-related posts:
- Halibut à la Chicken-Burger Fig. 35: Comely halibut fillet and grilled plantain The Twisty Switchboard has been swamped with...
- Twisty’s Kondiment Korner Once in a generation there arrives a condiment so breathtaking, so courageous, so majestically orange...
- All-Purpose Vegetable Slurry Korner. Twisty’s All-Purpose Raw Vegetable Slurry 1001 Uses Around Home, Boat, or Office “What’s for dinner,...
- A Real Good Salad Micro-greens! I’m like a sylph in a Grecian urn store with this stuff. Yet, like...
- Fromage Français Of The Day This, my little hoosiers, is a hunk of Brillat-Savarin, that exalted, down-swathed reliquary of centuries...
Loading tweets...
16 comments
Notorious Ph.D.
May 15, 2009 at 9:47 pm (UTC -6)
I am amused at the sample computation labeled “define happy.” I clicked on it with high hopes for some Big Answers, but all I got was a lousy thesaurus.
ambivalent academic
May 15, 2009 at 10:26 pm (UTC -6)
What are the standard units of a golden retriever? Inquiring minds demand an answer!
Orange
May 16, 2009 at 8:47 am (UTC -6)
I asked it “labrador retriever + poodle.” It doesn’t know what to do with that, either. It has better luck hedging on how much wood a woodchuck would chuck if it could chuck wood (just as much as it could).
yttik
May 16, 2009 at 8:49 am (UTC -6)
Ha, you have now exceeded my realm of experience. WolframAlpha what?? I’m still struggling to grasp the concept of Twitter and cell phone texting, both of which completely elude me. I get the concepts but quite simply, why would anyone want to spend their time doing these things?
rootlesscosmo
May 16, 2009 at 11:02 am (UTC -6)
For a critical opinion of Stephen Wolfram, the guiding genius of Wolfram|Alpha, see
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/
by a very smart mathematician named Cosma Shalizi. Math- and/or science-savvy blamers will be qualified (as ol’ rootless isn’t) to evaluate Wolfram’s claims and Shalizi’s takedown of them; knowing Cosma personally, though, I’m inclined to think he probably wouldn’t be so harsh if there weren’t plenty of reason. None of this is immediately relevant to Wolfram|Alpha itself, but the “About” page cites Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science which Cosma finds less impressive than its author seems to believe.
Nolabelfits
May 16, 2009 at 11:04 am (UTC -6)
I must be an idiot or something because I don’t undertand what the hell it is.
pheenobarbidoll
May 16, 2009 at 11:52 am (UTC -6)
I saw a horny toad today!!!
hero
May 16, 2009 at 11:53 am (UTC -6)
The new banner! I laughed, I cried, it was better than “Cats”!
Twisty I love you!
Pinko Punko
May 16, 2009 at 4:24 pm (UTC -6)
I really wish you would make the suffering of those of us in the world just a little less by instituting a rotating header situation. There have been so many good ones, in fact I love them all. The newest is always the greatest, I guess.
slythwolf
May 16, 2009 at 7:33 pm (UTC -6)
I never seem to notice a new header until someone else points it out. I’m always scrollin’ down to the words part, I guess, eager to see if Twisty has posted anything new since my last visit. A thought occurs: possibly I scroll down before the image has a chance to load.
Barn Owl
May 16, 2009 at 8:36 pm (UTC -6)
I don’t grok the thing at all. I asked it a simple question:
“War, what is it good for?”
And received no response. I then decided that it might better understand queries that contained numbers. So I tried again:
“25 or 6 to 4″
“party like it’s 1999″
“867-5309/Jenny”
“when I’m 64″
Nothing. Nada. Nichts. It’s as useful to me as is Twitter, apparently.
Pinko Punko
May 17, 2009 at 12:35 am (UTC -6)
As far as I can tell it aims to be a book of facts, but maybe an eensy bit more dynamic than that cuz it can do some math. I think they maybe overhyped this one, alas, that is the name of the game for Mr. Wolfram. That book of his is quite a tome, and I suspect very few people made it past the first few pages.
Jen
May 17, 2009 at 7:03 am (UTC -6)
What’s the problem here? I’m pretty sure that, in the UK, cheese and orange juice is a popular flavor of potato chips – sorry, crisps.
Marie-Elise
May 17, 2009 at 9:56 am (UTC -6)
Jen –
Ha! UK supermarkets are currently trialling crisp flavours Chilli & Chocolate, Builders’ Breakfast, Onion Bhaji, Fish & Chips, and others.
Nolabelfits
May 17, 2009 at 12:44 pm (UTC -6)
I love onion Bhajis. Haven’t been able to find one in all of America. Yet.
Jess
May 20, 2009 at 4:50 am (UTC -6)
They once did limited edition marmite flavour crisps. And baked bean flavour. Marie-Elise, you missed out Cajun Squirrel.
Cheese and orange juice would hardly be exciting.