[search] Wolfram Alpha … The Search Engine Of Choice for Supervillains … Who is Clark Kent? … Who is Bruce Wayne? … Who is Peter Parker? …
Wolfram Alpha – The Search Engine Of Choice for Supervillains
This entry was posted on Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Comics, Internet.
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The fact that a supervillian would have to be suspicious of any of these alter egos to back-engineer their alternate identities is exactly where Wolfram|Alpha goes wrong. You have to know the answer, or at least suspect it, to confirm it.
Limited datasets, erroneous results and the uptime of a trampolinist all have me reaching for the richer content worlds of underworld snitches Google and Wikipedia.
If Wolfram|Alpha was an app for my PDA or iPhone then fair enough, it’s limited but cute in what it purports to do. But as a serious tool for research it is abhorrent and has a long way to go before it can be ‘useful’.
For the moment I’ll keep to my scientific calculator for graphs, Google for finding spreadsheets and datasets and Wikipedia for general info.
Me too, for the simple reason that I’m happy with Google and Wikipedia.
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