June 2012
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Happy Birthday, Brian Wilson!
He was only 23 years old when Pet Sounds came out:
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Huey's Long Filibuster
Huey Long filibustered for 15 hours and 30 minutes on this day in 1935. As he held the Senate floor, he read the entirety of the US Constitution, offering detailed analysis on each section, and then turned to reading out Shakespeare, among other things.
Wolfram|Alpha calculates that he could speak roughly 139,500 words in that time, which means he could comfortably have gotten through the...
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The Venus Transit and More!
Yesterday we shared a blog post about tonight’s transit of Venus.
But did you know that Wolfram|Alpha is also a great resources for many other areas of astronomy?
Here are a few blog posts that we think are particularly interesting:
Moon Phases in Wolfram|Alpha
The Sun’s Roar
Following the Sun’s Unique Path
Making Real-Time Computations: Satellites
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May 2012
15 posts
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Warp Speed!
The Borg are coming. You’re joining the fleet at Wolf 359 to try and stop them. How fast do you need to go to get there in time?
First, find out how fast you need to go in terms of the speed of light:
Second, convert that into warp speed with Wolfram|Alpha’s new converter:
Wolfram|Alpha determines you would need a warp factor of 7.818 to reach Wolfram 359 within 3 days.
As to what...
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Water on Earth
If you take the total amount of water on Earth and divide it by the world population, that equals about .204 cubic kilometers of water per person.
Just how much water is that? Well, it is about .6 times the volume of oil transported by oil tankers worldwide in a year:
But what about just the fresh water?
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