Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minimun from TechnoBuffalo a lot of people use google bing or yahoo as their search engine of choice and if you're a good searcher you can probably find what you want within moments without having to go back and change your search query many times can usually find what you want quite quickly there's another search engine out there that doesn't have that much market share but it's a really powerful tool in finding information it's called Wolfram Alpha you've probably heard about it somewhere along the line and we're going to talk a little bit about how you can use this to get some information that may be useful too so let's start with a basic example let's say we want to know the weather in New York City something of course that you can do with Google but let's see the output so it's going to think for a minute and it's going to tell us the current temperature that's easy enough but it's also going to give us weather history and forecast so we're going to see the last few days of temperature the last few days of cloud cover conditions from the last few days historical temperature data really very specific stuff but let's get even more specific let's say we want the weather in New York City on a very specific day I'll say April second in the year nineteen eighty-one going all the way back this is great for research projects ok so it's thinking and here's the weather on that period we even get a daily trend of temperature in addition we can see the daily breakdown of cloud cover back many many years ago in this year very useful we type another city we compare the weather in New York City and say Philadelphia on this day in 1981 and so it's thinking and now we get side-by-side comparisons and graphs that compare these two regions showing the cloud cover and the conditions and the precipitation very interesting let's do another search let's say we want to look at what 409 99 British pounds is equal to well from alfre knows that i am from the US so it immediately converts it into u.s. dollars it shows an exchange rate for the last year although we can change this to the last 10 years to see how the UK UK pound and the US dollar has traded together we can also see what this equals in euros and in other forms of currency let's do something else let's say we're having breakfast and we want to know the nutritional facts of some whole milk a banana and cereal so it's thinking okay and it gives us the nutritional facts of all three of these things that we typed in very interesting but we want to see what it's like to put all of this together see the total calories of all of these things so we click total nutritional facts it thinks for a minute and it tells us with all of those things with one cup of milk one banana and 30 grams of cereal which is the average serving size for cereal we're at 359 calories and nine point four grams of fat pretty cool and pretty useful you can do this with really any kind of food that is common and it breaks it down towards the bottom here okay let's try something else let's get the GDP information about the GDP of say of France ok here's the result and we get a graph showing us back to the 70s and we can change the kind of scale we have from a logarithmic to a linear scale and we get a lot more information about inflation rate and unemployment rate and things like that very useful stuff let's do something else let's say the age of Bill Clinton Bill Clinton is 63 years old two months and 13 days old let's do something else let's let's say we want to know how many days it's been since the date let's say March third let's say you're born in nineteen eighty-two and you want to know how many days it's been who knows why you want to know this maybe you're making a family tree and you can see that it's been 27 years seven months and 29 days and from here you can actually copy it speaking of doing a family tree research project let's say you want to sort of visualize what it would look like in a family tree if somebody's referring to your great-aunt so you type great aunt and it shows you a little family tree so beyond what I've shown you here the search engine can do a lot more especially in the fields of chemistry biology mathematics physics finance if you're curious to what it can do and what it's really capable of go to wolframalpha.com and you'll see a button here for a video intro and also a one-page summary that will really drill down and show you the true capabilities of this really incredible search engine that's quite useful in a lot of situations that's it for now