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A comment on Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) Than Google. Parent comment

Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by stcredzero on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @01:41PM (#617199)
I tried:

    volume of all planets / volume of a grain of sand
and I got a graph going back to 1994 of:

    (the trading volume of Allstate stock) 
        * (volume of all planets in the solar system) 
           / (volume of a grain of sand)
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Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by dangoldin on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @01:56PM (#617237)
Interesting! It's because ALL is the ticker symbol of Allstate.

volume of planets / volume of a grain of sand gets the desired result

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Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by abecedarius on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @05:58PM (#617706)
The volume in question was actually that of the classical "sphere of fixed stars" -- I input it initially as something like "volume of the solar system" and had a brief impulse to accept its rephrasing as "planets volume", especially when I couldn't drill down further into its explanation. It's pretty natural to just assume it knows what you meant.
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Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by las3rjock on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @02:15PM (#617287)
That query calculates "median planet volume / volume of a small grain of sand", as mentioned by the grandparent poster. I believe it is still an open question how to get Wolfram|Alpha to calculate "total planet volume / volume of a small grain of sand".
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Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by PhazeDK on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @03:05PM (#617398)
"solar system volume / volume of grain of sand" works. http://www54.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solar+system+volume+/...

or "planets volume / volume of grain of sand"

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Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by dangoldin on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @02:36PM (#617338)
Ah my mistake.

I tried "9 * average (planet volume) / average(volume of a grain of sand)" now but that's not working either.

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Re:Things Wolfram Alpha Does Better (And Vastly Different) T... by jodrellblank on Tuesday May 19, 2009 @02:38PM (#617342)
"total planetary volume / volume of a grain of sand" gives an answer in "mile cubed shares per picoliter".

Yowch.

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