On: Wolfram Alpha: ‘People Just Need What We Are Doing’

[dreeves]

Yes, I use it regularly. Most common is for the kinds of things you might find in the CIA Factbook, or any number you'd expect to be buried in a Wikipedia page.

The most recent thing I was impressed by was this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+to+sunburn

I also tried creating a widget with WolframAlpha that seemed potentially useful: http://beeminder.com/agename.html (ie, getting a probability distribution on a person's age based on their first name)

[T-R → dreeves]

The sunburn one is a cool concept, but most of the data I put in tells me that sunburn is unlikely in Phoenix, AZ.

[crag → T-R]

Or that a sunburn is unlikely in Miami, Florida (which is where I am).

[dreeves → crag]

That's because it was night time. :) You can actually include a time and date.

Another handy heuristic: worry about sunburn when your shadow's shorter than you.

[kilian → dreeves]

It says my name is not a valid input, that's pretty harsh.

[wtn → kilian]

So did Renren, the China-based Facebook clone.

Characters in the Latin alphabet do not count as names when one tries to sign up there :(