Instead of replying to my endless queue of unanswered email, I spent some time last night playing with Google's newest toy, the Google Calculator. Maybe if people would email back solutions to arithmetic problems included in my email replies to them I would more readily respond to my backlog. But I digress.
After verifying that 2+2=4 (contrary to popular belief), I tried to figure out the largest difference between the smallest and largest units of measurement on a given scale, finally ending up with ~3.08 x 10^26 angstroms in a parsec (26 orders of magnitude difference). If you delve into the world of obscure metric prefixes, you can get up to 64 orders of magnitude difference....there are ~3.08 x 10^64 yoctometers in a yottaparsec. If you want to get really ridiculous, you can find out how many yoctometers there are in one vigintillion parsecs (~3.08 x 10^103 if you're curious).
That got me thinking...what's the limit of the Google Calculator's computational ability? 170! (170! = 1*2*3*4* ... *168*169*170) is equal to ~7.26 x 10^306, but 171! doesn't work. 2^1023 = ~8.99 x 10^307, but 2^1024 doesn't work. After some trial and error, the upper limit of the calculator is ~1.797 × 10^308...or basically anything less than 2^1024. My binary math is a little rusty, but that limit seems to correspond to 32-bit double precision real arithmetic. Which makes sense, but it would have been more fun if the limit would have been a googol (1.0 x 10^100). (Regarding other large numbers, neither googolplex nor infinity return calculator results.)
In addition to playing with big numbers, the calculator can help you finally figure out the number of drams in a pennyweight (~0.878 drams/pennyweight), rods in a fathom (~0.364 rods/fathom), or the speed of light in knots (582,749,918 knots)...but unfortunately not the mileage of your automobile in rods/hogshead.
Andy's got some more calculator fun going.
but it does know a bit about imaginary numbers
"wood a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood"
Google's new calculator may be no use but fear not, here's your answer:
minimum velocity required to chuck a piece of wood 1m :
s=ut+0.5at2
max efficiency at 45 degrees
(1,0)=(2-0.5)(V,V)+0.5(0,-9.8)(t2);
(2-0.5)=V=0.707
so E=1/2mv2 ...looking for m
2.97*1017=.5*m*(0.7072)
roughly 1018 kg of wood could potentially be chucked by a woodchuck operating at maximum efficiency (this is only an approximate maximum limit).
More on this here via here.
How many Monnnes in a Ku Ping? Answer - 9.95
pi*e pi e*pi e pi*e pi e*((
twenty three stone knots and
two billion smoot grains and
three thousand eight hundred
and seventy nine slug feet)
pi per carat yards)
per c*cubits per week
It's the link on my name (for now).
Can anyone else report that it still works?
Maybe a temporary glitch.
10^100 + 1 returns 10^100.
At first I thought, oh, they set a hard limit at one googol. But no:
10^100 - 1 also returns 10^100, while 10^100 + 10^100 gives the correct answer, 10^200.
They could just bail on these and show search results, just as they do on other queries they can't handle. They could use the perl BigNum module to get at higher values. They are a Python shop; there's probably something similar for Python. Well I'm not complaining; it's just fun to find quirks and bugs.
Try this one: how many femtoseconds in a millenium?
BTW for others who've posted their email address here, this site is getting scraped by spammers. I got spam on this kottke-specific address within 24 hours of posting: 1) nigerian scam; 2) domain names for sale; 3) africans looking for gold-related business partner scam. Just a plug from a happy user: use spamgourmet.com to prevent spam problems!
Google will even answer: how many minutes in a sidereal day?
Nice. Not that I'll ever need to know that, but nice to know it's there :-).
This thread is closed to new comments. Thanks to everyone who responded.
