That’s really the problem. Mashable does have a list of WolframAlpha easter eggs (also try entering ’hello world’) which are truly awesome from a pop-culture standpoint, but not really the computation knowledge that W|A is promising. It won’t answer ‘How many boroughs in new york city?’ or ‘teenage mothers in 2000′. A query of ‘population of West Germany in 1957′ returns nothing but a suggestion to retry ‘Germany in 1957′, to which it then ignores the year and provides current data for the nation. So maybe I went back in time to far: ‘population of Germany 1990′ provides a data point (79.4 million people) and plots it on a graph with data since 1970. What if I give it two data points, then, and ask the big calculator in the cloud to find the net change? Alas, querying ‘(population of Germany 2000) minus (population of Germany 1990)’ returns ‘(82.31 million people) Subtract[79.43 million people]‘, which is all too small of a step away from being what I would call ‘powerful computational knowledge’. Perhaps I didn’t use the correct syntax, but honestly, for this to work, I shouldn’t really need to bend my query to the esoteric whims of the Mathematica code. The correct syntax, by the way, is apparently ‘population germany 2000 – population germany 1990′, returning a useful answer of ’2.876 million people’.

So then I ask myself the question, “What would I want WolframAlpha to know?” The simple answer is ‘everything’, but that’s not fair. So below are a few questions I’d like to be able to ask a giant computer programmed by a genius. I welcome commenters to add the questions they’d really like to ask WolframAlpha, if it were everything we want it to be.

1 – Aggregates, like ‘How many cities are named Springfield?’ or ‘How many Main Streets in the USA?’
2 – Blue-sky sorts of questions, like ‘How much money would I need to start a new auto insurance company?’ or ‘How much fuel would a traditional rocket need to take a Voyager-sized satellite to the nearest neighboring star system?’
3 – Future events, like ‘What will be the next 10 years when Christmas Day falls on a Sunday?’ or ‘What is the current payoff date for the US National Debt?’

Okay, maybe that last one isn’t fair, either. but now I put it to you: What other questions would you like to ask WolframAlpha? Please add your comment.

When and why did they change?

“‘Not surprisingly, speakers of different languages describe events using the word orders prescribed by their language. The surprise is that when the same speakers are asked to ‘speak’ with their hands and not their mouths, they ignore these orders – they all use exactly the same order when they gesture,’ said Susan Goldin-Meadow, the Bearsdley Rum Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology and lead author of the paper, ‘The Natural Order of Events: How Speakers of Different Languages Represent Events Nonverbally’ published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”

So when faced with saying “The captain swings the pail,” for instance, test subjects all gestured “captain pail swings.” This hints at the basic syntax of the theoretical universal grammar, or the basic set of language rules shared by all humans…and little green Jedi masters.

Okay, to be honest, Yoda uses an entirely different messed up syntax than this–more of an Verb-Object-Subject order, with a lot of helping verbs tossed in to make it intelligible to English speakers. Although he seemed to conform more to English patterns in his later years. (Plus he’s not real, which I have to keep reminding myself.) But it seemed like a good idea at the time.

We signed all of our sellers’ closing documents this morning and found out the handful of work that needs to be done on the house before we can sell it. Not too bad, overall. Let’s just say we were afraid it would be worse, or at least more expensive.

In other news, have you heard about the family in Austria where the daughter & three children of incest were kept in the basement for 24 years? My wife and I have talked about the case quite a bit, and we’re convinced the wife was complicit. It’s not currently clear what the Austrian police think about that, but there’s no way something like this can happen for so long without her knowledge, her consent–even her assistance. Anyway, as a linguist by degree, I was struck by the article entitled “Dungeon Children Speak in Animal Language.”

I’m tagging this post under politics only because of the source of the material. What I have to say below has nothing to do with my politics.

I have only ever heard the word ‘divisive’ pronounced with the second syllable rhyming with ‘eye.’ I have never heard the word ‘divisive’ pronounced the way Obama said it today. He said it at least twice when referring to the remarks of his former pastor. Then in Fox News Channel’s commentary afterward, two or three people pronounced it the same way as Obama: with the second syllable rhyming with ‘his.’

Can anyone tell me if they’ve ever heard it pronounced this way, or was it a slip-up by Obama that the reporters later parroted? I think Obama was reading off the teleprompter and started to say the word ‘division,’ but changed it at the last second. I think he even paused oh-so-briefly when he said it the first time; then his oratory training led him to keep the same (mis)pronunciation when he repeated it.

I know it’s nitpicking, and as I said, I loved the speech and the speaker. But, alas, I am a trained linguist, and can’t help latching on to things like this.

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?