Wolfram Alpha know nahtink!

I tried Wolfram Alpha, the new search engine, that's apparently not a search engine. There's a great article in The Guardian about it today, which says (and I'll try not to do a Maureen Dowd on this) that asking Alpha something is like asking someone sitting in a room full of idiots savant. In other words, if you ask a question and one of the IS knows the subject you'll get the dish on it, but if the expert IS is not in the room, the answer is 'huh?'.

So I typed in my hometown and got Egyptian currency, the birr.

I typed in Halifax and found out that the city is 52m above sea level.

I typed in my date of birth and learned that I was born on the same day as Beck.

I don't care to learn any of those facts. If I did, I would've bothered remembering them the last time I heard them.

Still, it's very excellent for doing hard sums - you just type in the equation - so I added it to the Favourites list anyway. Check it out.

Competition is good.

Even for people who don't do evil.