[las3rjock]

I've run into some weird bugs trying to perform calculations in Wolfram|Alpha. For example, I cannot come up with any query for the general question "human height vs Empire State Building" that works, even though the separate queries "height Empire State Building" and "height average male" return answers with units of length.

[mechanical_fish]

Don't take this the wrong way -- I know where you're coming from, and it's natural to push the boundaries, especially for a hacker. But let's stop to appreciate how hilarious this comment looks to someone who majored in physics in the era just before the web. It's like eavesdropping on the gods as they complain about the quality of this year's batch of ambrosia.

You own a machine that returns a meaningful number for "height Empire State Building" and "height average male". In less than a second. And which will perform floating-point division for you, at the press of a few keys. And you're vaguely unhappy because you can't do it all in one step!

Now I know how Hans Bethe (acknowledged grandmaster of the slide rule, who routinely computed logarithms in his head) must have felt when he heard the young grad students comparing the features on their scientific calculators.

I wonder if tools like Wolfram Alpha will eventually succeed in doing for Fermi problems what Google did for Trivial Pursuit: Turning an activity that was formerly regarded as a touchstone of intelligence into a typing exercise. Estimating the number of piano tuners in Chicago will be a lot less impressive when you can just type "piano tuners in Chicago" into a text box and get the answer back to within a decimal place.

Fortunately, right now typing "piano tuners in Chicago" into Alpha just makes Javascript crash in Safari, so I guess we humans can sleep soundly for a while longer. ;)

[Retric]

Adding "average" helps it parse the question.

height Empire State Building divided by average height human

= 235

height Empire State Building divided by height human

Fails

[evilneanderthal]

Neat.

a billion light years / average height human * (1/9) furlong / age universe = 1.01 c (speed of light)

Very neat.

[las3rjock]

I was pretty sure I tried every permutation of the words "average," "height," and "human," but I guess I didn't. Bravo.

[skorgu]

It comes roughly close with something like "empire state building height + average human height" but yeah, that's quite odd.

Edit: And hitting "Show details" for a breakdown.