Beware the Geek » Maths http://bewarethegeek.com Just another WordPress weblog Sun, 11 Apr 2010 12:34:58 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Are you Skynet? http://bewarethegeek.com/2009/06/18/are-you-skynet/ http://bewarethegeek.com/2009/06/18/are-you-skynet/#comments Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:13:12 +0000 Sarah http://bewarethegeek.com/?p=21 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!

wolfram alpha does my homework

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.

wolfram alpha scans my DNA!

So the Terminator nerd in me just had to ask…

Are you skynet?

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

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