I was planning to write this post when Wolfram|Alpha came out, but I didn't get around to it.
Wolfram|Alpha is an audited knowledge base of information that can compute just about anything. I've compiled a list of examples below that don't even show half of the possibilites of Wolfram|Alpha - but are pretty damn cool demos of the power that Wolfram|Alpha gives you.
- Comparing companies' revenue
- Quickly find out hex colour codes
- See exactly how old you are
- Check the weather
- Work out VAT for something
- Get your maths geek on
- See how long and far it is from your current location to somewhere
- Compare any dimensions of totally random landmarks
- Get information about your body
- Get a food label rendered for just about anything
- Get information about a film
- View information about virtually any animal, along with their biology taxonomy
- View the current exchange rate for any currency
- View info about your name
- View how your last name ranks in the world
- Find definitions
- Find out the meaning of life
- See how blind I really am
- See how big a killer cancer is - and get scared
- See how long you're expected to live
- See how many people there probably are in the world
- Find out the time for lazy people
I think I better stop now, but I really could go on doing that forever.
My absolute pet peeve about this site is the fact that it's called 'Wolfram|Alpha'. That's just plain ugly. 'WolframAlpha' or just 'Wolfram Alpha' would look waaaay better. Somehow I don't think that it will get turned into a verb either...
Try it out for yourself, or watch the overview video from which I loosely based my examples.