Sometimes, Google is just scarily cool

[jducoeur]

They apparently added a seriously funky calculator to Google while I wasn't looking. Besides doing all the usual mathematical calculations, it knows about pretty much every kind of unit they could think of. We discovered this at work when one of my co-workers tried typing "how many milliseconds in a day" when he was feeling too lazy to calculate it himself, and it gave him the answer.

Try typing "0x7d3 in roman numerals" (one of their examples) into the Google search bar. Yes, it can do conversions from hexadecimal to roman. Or "2.4 cubits in parsecs". That is so pointlessly neat that it wins major geek points...

Comments

[mindways]

Yes, it's very cool! It even confirms pawo's discovery from years ago: that 1 cubic attoparsec is almost exacly equal to 1 fluid ounce.

[shipbrook.livejournal.com]

Sadly, it doesn't seem to know how many cubits are in an ell.

attoparsec

[antoniseb.livejournal.com]

one attoparsec is about 0.1 feet [1.2 inches]. This has been one of my favorite odd-ball units since high school. As units go, however, I don't think this one is very precisely known. I'd be surprised to find we know it better than one part in 100 million.

Yes, the google calculator is pretty geeky-cool.

Re: attoparsec

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Attoparsecs per microfortnight is a standard physics geek measure of velocity; it's very close to 1 inch per second.

Google doesn't know what to make of it today. I expect their top geeks will make short work of this by day's end...

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

And it even knows the answer the entire Earth was constructed to calculate.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

however, its inability to produce the question to the ultimate answer tells me that we're living on Earth 2 and it hasn't finished computing yet.... :-P

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, Neil actually found it before I did. It is indeed truly nifty. It even understands furlongs per fornight. I think you will find that Google always r0}{0rz, however. Other new features include producing street maps, phone numbers, and dictionary definitions.

In all seriousness, Google's well on its way to being the central authority for all internet services. Even given how cool they are, that's pretty scary.