SPUG: WolframAlpha - a great GUI and API for computing everyday knowledge

[Ryan Corder]

On Thu, Mar 04, 2010 at 12:50:59PM -0800, Kevin Fink wrote:
| I have a hard time with the UI. They never seem to be able to parse any
| useful query I come up with. For example, I would love to see a graph of the
| number of large earthquakes per year over the past 100 years or so. I tried
| "number of earthquakes > 6.0 per year", "number of earthquakes per year >
| 6.0", and various other permutations, but couldn't get it to tell me
| anything useful at all.

I think, in this case, it has to do with what historical data they have in
their databases.  One can argue that the data is readily available, but
whether or not they've done anything with it is anyone's guess.

Case in point, 'earthquakes 2010' returns good results, while 'earthquakes
2009' returns nothing.

For reference, 'earthquakes since 1900' caused it to computer for 10 minutes
before I cancelled the request.


-- 
Ryan Corder                  ||     () ASCII ribbon campaign
<ryanc at greengrey.org>     ||     /\  against HTML email
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x1CB59D69
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