I think I will call it Wolfie

There's a new search engine that might be a good compliment to Google called Wolfram|Alpha. At first I wasn't that impressed with it, but the more I use it, the more I'm beginning to see its value. This isn't a search designed for finding web pages, this is more of an engine that makes use of known bits of information and manipulates it into some
kind of statistical result for you to view. So search engine is a misnomer - it's more of a fact based computational knowledge engine. It computes answers. It provides answers to certain kinds of questions. It's an 'answer engine'. The way this engine interprets your input takes a little getting used to, sometimes not knowing what to make of your query. So there is a learning curve here. As I said to a good friend of mine, Wolfram needs to 'relax the syntax' a little. But when it is able to understand your query, the results are quite extraordinary.

Some queries you can try to give a small sampling of what Wolfram Alpha is capable of:
[your city] weather
$50,000/yr
synonyms of [word]
time in [city]
mortgage $450,000, 4%, 25 years
brother's daughter's daughter
vitamin d in 1 cup milk
tides [city] tomorrow
[planet] [time] [date]

What is butter? Wolfie knows - it'll display the average nutrition facts. Ask it to convert $1 to British pounds, or the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Who starred in Casablanca? How was the weather in New York on May 26, 1987? How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

This is just the tip of the iceberg though, you should watch this video tutorial.

One of the things the tutorial demonstrated that I was curious to try was name distribution. I typed in "Karl" and it showed that people born who were named Karl peaked around 1960 / 61. I was born in 1961. For Darlene, her name peaked around 1959 - she was born 2 years earlier. Heidi (my sister): you need to try this... you're going to laugh. I tried Olivia (my grand-daughter) - this name has been seriously peaking since 2000. These are the kinds of things Wolfram Alpha can show you. The best part of this project is that it's very new, so as it accumulates more data from the world, there's no telling what kinds of analysis, relationships and calculations it will be able to do for us. Looking down the road, this kind of power will be accessible through robots or wearable portable assistants. Then some serious shit's going to happen.