I was planning to write this post when Wolfram|Alpha came out, but I didn't get around to it.

Wolfram|Alpha is an audited knowledge base of information that can compute just about anything. I've compiled a list of examples below that don't even show half of the possibilites of Wolfram|Alpha - but are pretty damn cool demos of the power that Wolfram|Alpha gives you.

• Comparing companies' revenue
• Quickly find out hex colour codes
• See exactly how old you are
• Check the weather
• Work out VAT for something
• Get your maths geek on
• See how long and far it is from your current location to somewhere
• Compare any dimensions of totally random landmarks
• Get information about your body
• Get a food label rendered for just about anything
• Get information about a film
• View information about virtually any animal, along with their biology taxonomy
• View the current exchange rate for any currency
• View info about your name
• View how your last name ranks in the world
• Find definitions
• Find out the meaning of life
• See how blind I really am
• See how big a killer cancer is - and get scared
• See how long you're expected to live
• See how many people there probably are in the world
• Find out the time for lazy people

I think I better stop now, but I really could go on doing that forever.

My absolute pet peeve about this site is the fact that it's called "Wolfram|Alpha". That's just plain ugly. "WolframAlpha" or just "Wolfram Alpha" would look waaaay better. Somehow I don't think that it will get turned into a verb either...

Try it out for yourself, or watch the overview video from which I loosely based my examples.