Today is my day off work. I was planning on a long, leasurely sleep-in, maybe read a bit…no. I forgot to turn off my alarm. I was woken at some ungodly non-day-off hour. Sigh. So what does a young nerd do on her day off when she’s awake 3 hours ahead of schedule? Why, plays with Wolfram Alpha of course! For those of you who haven’t already heard about it from some source or another, Wolfram Alpha is a new method of searching for the answer to problems. It’s not a search engine; the creators call it a “computational knowledge engine.” In a nutshell, it’s very cool. And I wish I’d had it when I was at university wading my way through maths!

If you click the approximate form links, x is approximately 11. I’ve also asked it about plutonium, gravity, and the molecular mass of DNA. But what really blew my mind is when it offered to sequence some DNA and find code occurences within the human genome. When I was working in the lab this would have been an amazing tool! And I bet most of the scientists out there who work in molecular biology or genetics don’t even know this thing exists.

So the Terminator nerd in me just had to ask…

I’m glad it doesn’t want to launch missiles at us.