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New Company Seeks to Bring Semantic Context To Numbers
A new company, True#, is seeking to bring extensive semantic context to numbers to give them obvious meanings just as certain words have obvious meanings to most readers. "Most of us can probably recognize 3.14159 and the conceptual baggage it carries, but how many of us would recognize 58.44? (That's a mole of sodium chloride, in grams, for the curious.) And the response that would work for words — look it up — doesn't work so conveniently for numbers. Only one of the top-10 hits in Google refers to salt, and Bing fails entirely (though it does offer 'Women's Sexy Mini Skirts by VENUS'). Clearly, we haven't figured out how to make the Web work for numbers in the same way it does for words."
1337 returns EXACTLY what I expected.
I get one return for NaCl on Bing and nothing about miniskirts.
Cue the conspiracy theorists.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
...it returns "number of years it will take before True# turns a profit."
I'm seriously confused how many companies will jump at this -- and why someone like Google won't just do it for free? Couldn't you use Google Base for something like this?
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Only one of the top-10 hits in Google refers to salt, and Bing fails entirely (though it does offer "Women's Sexy Mini Skirts by VENUS").
Bing seems far superior to my hormon^W^Wme.
So, put in the (numerical) answer and it gives you the question?
Thank God Douglass Adams didn't know about this.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Need I say more?
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
How often do you have a number without units? Putting in "58.44g" returns NaCl, sodium chloride, or molecular weight in every one of the first page results.
For the number 420, Wikipedia's Cannabis information page comes up #1 in both google and bing.
3494.13
332
8494.354
2324.234
Hahaha, I kill me sometimes.
Get it? 332 ... 3494.13 -> 8494.354 ?
Man, that is too funny!
1. Eleventeen
2. 867-5309
3. 451
4. 1999
5. a gazillion
6. THIS MANY (holding up three fingers)
7. infinity minus one
8. approximately
9. 9/11 (may already be taken)
10. Top ten
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
When I searched "1234" on google and bing, the top results are about that Feist song. Thank goodness it doesn't mention anything about it being my root admin password and my luggage combination--hey! Where did my bag go? It was just here, and why is there a sudden spike in my internet tra#%^W&*s%!$AF{:
---[CONNECTION LOST]---
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The weight of a mole of sodium varies by location. In most of the universe the weight of anything is almost zero.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I typed "12345" into Google, and Google did not know that was the combination to my luggage.
a sodium chloride solution specifically
Why in the hell would I want to search for a number with no context? Who thinks that way?
TV Detectives investigating the death of a Chemistry Prof. would find this tool invaluable...
I'm sure you've heard the one about the linguist who was walking across campus with his girlfriend when they saw six descriptivists beating up a prescriptivist. She turned to him in horror and asked, "Aren't you going to help?"
"No," he replied, "I think six is enough."
I have had this need when reverse engineering and debugging algorithms in software. There are magic numbers in the formulas and I have no idea what they mean.
Oh, yes. My .vimrc contains the constant 2551443 -- ask Google for it. Then, ask Google for "2551443 seconds".
2635622779696759818963956926355997625653382829357706805515232 / 838944787028681613144502774660896402692975681322322888764935
I have lots of better ones. But they'd probably break Slashdot to post them.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Wolphram Alpha calls it 58.4
so much for significant figures.
You only get significant figures from significant search engines.
I have had this need when reverse engineering and debugging algorithms in software. There are magic numbers in the formulas and I have no idea what they mean.
Additionally, if something like this was rolled into a more generalized search algorithm, it could be used the other way around. Google could know, for example, that a paper with the number 58.44 a lot of times is probably about NaCl even if it is not mentioned explicitly.
Sorry, you're out of luck there. Magic numbers work because they're actually magical. Sorry to burst your bubble if you still believe in things like algorithms and the tooth fairy.
Did you honestly believe that computers worked by interpreting a series of logical instructions input by a mortal human being? Trust me. When you're ready to understand you won't need to search.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.