ResearchBuzz

This is for my friends who are runners and racers, I think you might like it. Wolfram|Alpha announced last week that it has added data for a variety of physical activities. But this goes way beyond “You worked out for x minutes so you burned y calories.” Of course it does, since it’s Wolfram|Alpha…

Start at http://www.wolframalpha.com and put something simple in, like running for two miles. You’ll get a screen that looks like this:

As you can see, W|A invites you to provide more information, and if you haven’t yet it assumes you’re a 25-year-old, 160 pound male. The default allows W|A to provide you with several additional sets of data, including estimated calorie burn, speed (hey, how many yards per second am I going?), pace, distance, and time. I can enter a slightly different search:

running 12 minutes at 4 mph

This adds another table of information called “Race Predictions,” showing how long it would take you to finish a variety of race lengths based on the speed you specified (8 hours and 13 minutes for a marathon, for example.)

You can also ask W|A questions about exercise, like this:

how long to burn 110 calories

W|A will present you with a list of available activities (over 300 of them!) and once you choose one will give you a table of calories burned, though you will have to specify your weight. If you just enter the query burn calories and put in your physical data it’ll give you a baseline of how many calories you’ll burn a day at different levels of physical activity.

There are some limitations to how you can access this new data in W|A. I could not, for example, figure out how to compare two activities to see which one burned calories fastest. Nor could I enter a query like burn 100 calories in sixty minutes and get a list of activities which would burn that many calories based on my physical information. But if you’re looking for exercise estimates and some nifty running information, check out this new dataset from W|A.

The other day as I was poking around the Internet I kept coming across the following date: December 29, 1967. If you are not a Star Trek person, you might not know that that’s the date that the Trouble With Tribbles episode was first aired (at least according to the many sources I kept coming across — I have not cross-checked and alas, I am not a Star Trek person.)

This amused me and I wondered exactly how much time had passed since that episode aired. Google can do some mathematical calculations so I figured I might as well try it for dates. So I went to Google and tried:

December 29, 1967 – December 29, 2009

That got me results — over 12 million of them as a matter of fact — but nothing about date calculation. But you know, as soon as I saw the results I thought to myself, “I bet Wolfram|Alpha could calculate these dates for me.”

And I was right!

I went to http://www.wolframalpha.com/ and entered December 29, 1967 – December 29, 2009 and WA gave me the following output:

As you can see, WA calculated that I was looking for the space between two dates and gave me the calculations in years, weeks, and days. It also helpfully informed me that December 29, 1967 was on a Friday.

After I played with this for a while (finding out *exactly* how many days you’ve been alive may make you a little tired) I wondered if WA could do calculations based on dates. For example, would the following query work?

Fifteen days after December 29, 1967

Yes, that does work. It gives you the date (Saturday, January 13, 1968) calculates the time difference between that day and this one, and then proceeds to give the information it normally does about a single date (notable events, date formats, moon phase, sunrise and sunset.) It works if you’re looking for dates counting backwards from a specified date as well.

I decided to through a curve ball at WA. Since it lists the moon phrases, I figured it should be able to calculate dates based on the full moon. So I asked it:

Fifth full moon after December 29, 1967

And it gave me an answer! According to WA the fifth full moon after December 29, 1967 was 9:06:35 am EDT Sunday, May 12, 1968.

I tried asking WA about the first solstice after December 29, 1967. It got that one right. I finally tripped it up asking for the first sunrise that was exactly 7:05 AM after December 29, 1967. And even now I’m wondering if my syntax was screwed up.

Wolfram|Alpha is a great compliment to Google; they’re not competitors. Being able to play with dates is just one more proof of that.

Smart move. Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, has announced its teaming up with fact/calculation/whatever engine Wolfram|Alpha, available at http://www.wolframalpha.com/.

Wolfram|Alpha launched earlier this year to a large and ridiculous speculation that it was a “Google killer”. Wolfram|Alpha is not a Google killer; it can’t do many of the things Google can do. On the other hand, it can do many things Google can’t, from provide specific date weather information, to answering algebra questions, to telling me the calories and Vitamin A in my morning smoothie. (To get an idea of what W|A can do, visit the site and search for september 19 2003 denver co.) Having Wolfram|Alpha’s capabilities teamed up with Bing’s Web searchiness sounds like a great idea to me.

So how do these two engines fit together? I found that Wolfram|Alpha was in evidence when I entered appropriate queries. For example, if I do a search for 2y + 3 = 11, I’ll get a “Calculation” result at the top of the page. (Though I’m not 100% certain that this is Wolfram|Alphra at work as it does not have a Wolfram|Alpha designation on it.) The Bing announcement blog also shows how to get information on BMI, nutrition, and complex math functions.

This isn’t going to take the place of using Wolfram|Alpha directly, I don’t think — there are too many ambiguous queries that can give me great results on W|A that might confuse Bing (see september 19 2003 denver co as an example.) On the other hand, what a smart move by Bing: this goes a step beyond the “reference” that you might get ala Wikipedia and into calculation. And it gets Wolfram|Alpha out in front of more people, which it deserves; it’s a nifty fact engine.