World Domination Today | Public BETA

I've been working on a little project for the last week, something to get my creative juices flowing, and found inspiration in one of the blogs I read. I decided there was a gap in the market for a subversive-but-silly internet magazine devoted to megalomaniacs, so I set about building one. It's still very embryonic, but I've been gradually adding material to it and feel that it's ready for a kind of public beta. So, have a look around the snappily-titled World Domination Today, and I hope some of it is at least mildly diverting. There's a mixture of real science, speculation on future technologies, and general tips for would-be overlords. I hope to add some profiles of historical tyrants, and possibly features on some of the best fictitious evil geniuses.

If you like what see, it'd be great to have other people joining in. Maybe we'll build a cult following, or it'll just be another one of my stillborn projects... who can tell?!

Playing with Wolfram|Alpha

I must admit that Wolfram|Alpha takes a while to get used to. You have to go through a small language barrier to talk to it, and for most of its calculations you have to simplify your language into something less vague than English grammar provides for. Having said that, once you learn its ways, it is an utter, fascinating delight.

After calculating the entire nutritional content of my dinner, I went scouting for some more fascinating gems. The computational engine has an amazing ability to tell you things you never thought you wanted to know. The current position of the moon and planets, for example.

Aside from this more useful-seeming information, it also provides some delightful answers when you ask it simple questions. It will quote Dylan or Shakespeare back at you. It will tell you a little about itself and gives the obligatory answer to the meaning of life. It knows about music, nature, names, everything!

Oh, and if you're interested, find out what your birthday was like, or how old you were on momentous days...

P.S. Just as a measure of how addictive this thing is, here's what the weather's been like for most of my life!

Wolfram Alpha, the Future of Search?

Stephen Wolfram's new search engine has been all over the web this weekend, touted as a "Google-killer" and much-hyped by the media. This unlikely and clumsily-named little piece of web gadgetry has the potential to revolutionise the way we find information. The "Computational Knowledge Engine" is ground-breaking because of the way it can "understand" and manipulate the data you search for. It is even heralded as a step towards artificial intelligence, because of its ability to take complex questions in natural language and compute a relevant result. By comparison, Google starts to look worryingly like a list of the dead. The sheer amount of irrelevant information on most web search results pages is often enough to make you cry into the collar of your Star Trek T-shirt. Wolfram Alpha will change this. It will be captivating.

All of which is why I'm now so frustrated that the damn thing, despite having been publicly lauded with such energy, is not actually usable yet. It is still in closed BETA-testing mode. So we're left with a situation where one of the most important leaps forward in computer science is just around the corner, but with a vague "it'll be open some time in May" caveat.

That's simply not cricket! I want to play with it now! I want it to be hard at work calculating the distance to Mars in sound wavelengths of D Minor. I want it to be telling me how many times I can listen to the Flight of the Bumblebee before the 2012 Olympics. I want it to confirm the correlation between the decline in Piracy over the last century and rising carbon dioxide levels. I want it to wrestle for milliseconds over the complex question of whether more money has been made from selling coffee or gold in the history of man. It must be straining away under the weight of such problems as how many average-weight thoroughbred horses the Space Shuttle can carry into low Earth orbit, or what the capital of Somaliland divided by the capital of Rutland is. Wolfram Alpha is capable of answering these questions and more. So why is the world left in the unenviable position of knowing about its potential for surreal time-wasting, but not able to use it?

It's a crime against my manic over-active imagination. I need it now. Otherwise, I may explode from daft inquisitiveness.

Not Another Online Project

Well, this isn't quite true. I've had many websites and different online projects over the years, but no real personal blog. Other people seem to have them and enjoy the process. So I have decided to take my own slice of the interweb cake, with this crumbly bloggamy-jig. Like all good cakes, I hope it delivers on the promise of jam and dusted icing sugar. In the end, that's all we can ever ask for.

Overt and out,

Shrubs.