February Delicious links

Last book title in Hunger Games trilogy announced

The title of the last book in the series by Suzanne Collins, following The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, will be Mockingjay. It is due to be released on August 24, 2010, by Scholastic.

Wonder of the Web: Wolfram|Alpha

If you are not aware of the Wolfram|Alpha computational search engine, you probably should be. It's really something else - as it states on the homepage: "Today's Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone."

I don't know who these people are, but they need a lot more initiative. Sheesh. (Actually, you can now watch the man responsible for WolframAlpha give a dynamic 20-minute presentation.)

At any rate, it turns out that Wolfram|Alpha can actually give step-by-step solutions to quadratic problems, as demonstrated in this blog post. It can also be a very handy search engine for finding anything from finding out how many milliliters are in 10 Tbsp, the population density of Ghana (given by square mile, square kilometre, and square foot, no less), or where the note A is located on a keyboard (it will even play the note for you!).

Hundreds of other examples are also available, from elementary math to ocean comparisons to languages.

Notably, Wolfram|Alpha provides what they call source information for the data presented in their results, which are not necessarily where the information came from but further sources for similar information. These other sources are conveniently linked in the source information list.

This is definitely worth a look for those interested in math and science, but Wolfram|Alpha has data that applies to pretty much every other subject area as well.