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I use it for a bunch of small questions:

1. Calculations wrt inflation: “$1000 1975 in 2021”

2. Draw a mathematical equation: “(x^2 + y^2 -1)^3 -x^2y^3 <0”

3. Computations with visualisation: “area under y=x^2 from 1 to 3”

4. Bitrate calculations: “1.5TB at 10mbps”

5. Compare weather/climate between cities: “compare weather brussels and cape town”

I use ddg as search engine, so can just add !wa to the query and ddg will redirect it to Wolfram Alpha. I don’t use it very often but love how quickly it can answer most problems.



I find myself doing unit queries like 4 all the time. "80 bytes / second * 1 year" results in ~2.5 GB. Etc etc. It's very convenient for making sure that you're handling units correctly.

It's also really good for random facts. For example, "75 kWh at California electricity price". Or if you know something takes 20W to run continuously and you want to know how much it costs... "20 W * 1 year at california electricity price".


There’s a fun estimation technique from Programming Pearls: pi seconds is a nano century. So, 3.14e7 seconds in a year.

    80 bytes/sec * 3.14e7 sec = 2.4e9 bytes

http://wordaligned.org/articles/pi-seconds




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