Hacker News Reader

Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

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)

View on HN

Interesting! It's because ALL is the ticker symbol of Allstate.

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

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".

Ah my mistake.

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

"total planetary volume / volume of a grain of sand" gives an answer in "mile cubed shares per picoliter".

Yowch.

"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"

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com