Saturday 06 Jun 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

Another weekend, another pipe organ.

First off, I visited the church I have to park outside every week when I go to my dance classes. I’ve been there several times, but it’s always locked. From the various notices, it seems the church is open for general visitation on Saturday mornings. (Indeed, it seems to be an unwritten law that all churches open on Saturdays from 10 till noon for socialising.) So I parked up my car this morning, noting that the car park was far more busy than usual. I got out of my car and headed towards the church. As it happens, I did this at the exact moment that a lady wearing a clerical collar started walking in the exact same direction.

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Friday 05 Jun 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

OK, so apparently Wolfram have launched a thingy called Alpha. They call it a “search engine”, but really it’s actually an online calculator, much like Google’s build-in calculator capabilities. The difference, of course, is that Alpha is powered by Mathematica, the most powerful maths software on the face of the Earth.

So… they’re giving us free access to their flagship product? Well, not quite, no. It’s supposed to accept “natural language” input and give you any and all data it thinks might be “interesting” about the result.

Alright, so let’s see it in action. Let’s query, say, 2 + 2. It tells me that the result is 4, which is written “four”, and even gives me a “visual representation” (four dots). M’kay, well that’s nice… Now what if I ask, say, 4!? I get the answer, 24, plus a word spelling, plus a visual representation. I also get some formulas about the Gamma function and the Pochhammer symbol, and a few integral representations.

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