If you’re tech enough, you could probably have guessed what this topic was all about, if not, then two words: Wolfram Alpha. Despite it’s initial, general appearance, it’s not a search engine, but a “a computational knowledge engine”. Instead of gathering information from the Internet, it has it’s own internal knowledge base, and hence returns factual answers based on what you ask, rather than opinions.
This can be anything from share prices to, well, as someone put it this morning:
The integral of x^2 dx from 0 to the population of Jordan divided by the GDP of japan in British pounds per second.
And there I was surprised I still remember what an integral is from A-Level maths. In English, the question is asking, if you were to draw the graph of X^2 (which is a curve that gets steeper as you increase X, as the result goes 0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25 etc for every increment), up to where X = Jordan’s population, and then work out the area under this curve, and divide that figure by the Japan’s annual economic output in terms of sterling per second.
The answer is in fact 7.569*10^14 persons cubed seconds per pound sterling, which I’m still trying to decipher. The best bit is it even gives a graph based on how the figure would have changed over history based on Jordan’s population growth and Japan’s economy (though, it’s failed to account for change in exchange rates between Yen and GBP), and then cites its sources.
As it turns out, this kind of calculation is just a smidgen of what it’s capable of. I was going to give some more examples, but you might as- well just look at the ones already on the website.
I tried a few experiments of my own, and found that the average global wage rate for each person is approximately £1.17 per hour, (the flaw here is that not everyone in the labour force is actually employed, so the actual figure is just a little higher). Furthermore, the world labour force only makes up 45.99% of the world population, meaning that if the world were communist, everyone would earn a whopping 54 pence per hour, which is still greater than my average salary between last October and last month.
This is why commy-dictator Kim Jong Il should be put in charge of the British M.o.D., we’d all have a pay rise, and on another plus-side I’m also sure he’d do a better job of brainwashing us into thinking our troops are fighting for a noble cause.