Fun with Google's Calculator

Posted by Andy Baio

Google’s new calculator is a fun diversion, with several undocumented new features. Here’s a few. (Kottke has some more impractical uses. Please post more as you find them.)

– How long can you play a 30GB iPod without repeating a song? Answer: 18.2 days

– How much hard drive space does one hour of 128kbps MP3s consume? Answer: 56.25 megabytes

– How many seconds in a decade? Answer: 315,569,260

– 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit in Celsius? Answer: 37 degrees

– How many feet in a smoot? Answer: 5.58 (via Ryan)

– What’s the answer to life, the universe and everything? Answer: 42

– What’s the answer to life, the universe and everything multiplied by the speed of light divided by three teaspoons? Answer: 8.51523871 × 1014 m-2 s-1

– What’s the speed of a Delorean going back in time? Answer: 47,600,819,200 m3 kg/s4 (via Cam)

Comments

    More no dice: “head of pin / angels”

    A continuing absence of dice: “weight of rock god cannot lift”

    Dicelessness: “roads a man must walk down”

    No for:

    wood a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could

    chuck wood

    licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop

    the loneliest number

    maids a’ milking

    deadly sins

    Those Stanford Ph.D nerds at Google aren’t even trying.

    I’m assuming that Google just hooked in an existing calculator program, and have been desperately searching the net to figure out which one, but I can’t find it! GNU Units is close, but not quite it, I don’t think.

    Having this available on my cell phone looks to be very handy indeed…

    I’m sure we’ll see a Google magic 8 ball very soon.

    For the Delorean traveling through time you should divide by the weight of a Delorean in Kgs which gives you 37 778 427.9 m3 / s4 which makes sense if you consider the fact that you would be traveling in 4th dimensional space

    In response to the question of which MIT geek did the calculator, anon is right–I was at a Search Strategies show last week, and either Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google) or one of their engineers was talking about the calc function–it was done in house as a kind of side project, and when the folks at Google heard about it, they thought it was cool so they cleaned it up and implemented it. At least, that’s what they were saying.

    No, you need to DIVIDE by 88MPH.

    1.21GW / 88MPH

    The answer is expressed in Newtons, a unit of acceleration (force).

    We all know that acceleration warps space-time from the disney movie “Black Hole”, right?

    42 is a bogus answer because later in te book the question to the answer seems to be “Five Times Nine” (=54) and Arthur says “I always knew there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe”.

Comments are closed.