Blok blogs

Just played around a bit with WolframAlpha.

I can see it has added value especially for scientists and engineers. It’s a kind of Mathematica with a web front end and a large dataset to obtain the information from. Its use will largely be depending on the quantity (and quality of course) of the underlying dataset. To give you an impression of its current state, the data it has of Balkenende (Prime Minister of the Netherlands) is still limited (what is his salary?) and nothing compared to the data that is provided on Wikipedia.

On the other hand, it’s quite nice to be able to quickly see some math plots and it’s also good in doing conversions and quick calculations such as 3 feet or time in tokyo.

All in all, I think I will use WolframAlpha every now and then as a companion to Wikipedia.

After the old NKS, Wolfram is about to present another (and better?) NKS version to the world. A new kind of search that is surely making me curious! Hope it will live up to my expectations when it’s getting live.

See this preview (the video is low quality but gives an impression).