New google calculator feature

Google Calculator feature ^ | August 13, 2003 | me

[John Jorsett]

I just learned that google has implemented a calculator as part of their feature set. "Big deal," you might say, but one capability that I found very useful is its ability to convert units. Try entering "100 pints in gallons" (don't put quotes around it when entering it), or "5000 kilometers in furlongs". Very cool, at least to me. I can't tell you how often I have to do those pesky "angstroms <--> parsecs" conversions (ok, I jest, but it will do "100 degrees fahrenheit to celsius," which definitely IS useful). It can also do ordinary math, of course, for those occasions when you just want to dash off a quick calculation.

[Drago]

Thanks for the reply...I finally figured it out about the exact time you posted! ;-)

[supercat]

The calculator is pretty cool, though the documentation seems a bit lacking. For example, the sqrt() computes square root [and the calculator can even work dimensional analysis through it] but I can't figure anything out for cube root.

Still, it is pretty neat to be able to plug in "sqrt(32 watts/8 ohms)" or "sqrt(2* (16 feet)/g)"and get a meaningful result [though the latter example shows that dimensional analysis isn't everything!]

[krb]

Damn...

(e^2) inches = 18.7682025 centimeters

[krb]

You can do cubed root by raising to the power of 1/3:

27^(1/3) = 3

[LibKill]

This really works.

"cubic yard in pecks"

"1 cubic yard = 86.7849026 US pecks"

[Semper911]

Bump and a bookmark. Thanks.

[Ichneumon]

I thought I might stump it (or overflow it), but entering "c in angstroms per millennium" gives "the speed of light = 9.4605284 × 10²⁸ angstroms per millennium"

[Ichneumon]

Another rule of thumb - a picoparsec is just about a quarter mile.

And light travels about a foot in a nanosecond.

[supercat]

You can do cubed root by raising to the power of 1/3

Hmm... when I tried that before it didn't seem to work with dimensional analysis, but now it seems to. Must've miskeyed something before.

[dfwgator]

Sure enough when I typed "100000 according to Louis Farrakhan" I got back "1,000,000" as an answer.