Humor Darwinian gardening again 18 Jun 2008 The Darwinian Gardener is interviewed in the newsjournalonline. He explains how Darwinian gardening also applies to buried sprinkler systems, which is something that never occurred to me, I must admit. But I think he’s running perilously close to self-contradiction even having sprinklers. Read More
History A meme. A medieval meme. 25 Feb 200818 Sep 2017 … a female deer. Oops, sorry, wrong thread. Anyway, a medievalist, goblinpaladin, has tagged me with a meme. Now I don’t’ get tagged a lot with memes, possibly because folk know I have published on them, both for and more recently against, but you can’t deny the buggers on the… Read More
If we exhert a little effort and persuade five of those species to become extinct, then we could claim “how many species of swallow are native to Africa?” as a candidate for Ultimate Question (also as a Grand Unification: Python/Adams).
we tried this in the lab yesterday, it does give you a very detailed answer for the European swallow.
I entered, “What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?” The correct answer was given. I am now at peace.
Great minds think alike — the swallow speed was the 1st question I typed in! Given that the engine has trouble parsing much simpler inputs I’ve tried, this is almost certainly a hard-coded answer, like 42. So double fail.
It didn’t know who did the twiddly bits along the coast of Norway. If they’re going to code in one Guide reference…
Question: what is the frame problem? And have you solved it? Answer: Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input. Yes indeed.
I’m kinda upset the Wolfram Alpha people hadn’t thought of The Last Question. Entering “How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?” gives a “I dunno what to do with this” response.
But there’s an answer, as I noted before. Alpha should know that… You’re expected to teach it. If you don’t teach it, it won’t learn.