The panic thread!

Wolfram Alpha is awesome.

Derivative of $\sec^2 x$
Satellite flyover Edinburgh

More specifically: ISS flyover Edinburgh

estimated average cruising airspeed of an unladen European swallow
Number of primes less than or equal to 10,000

It does eventually barf if you become too specific, and some things don't quite make sense (for example, 'male population as a percentage' doesn't give the logical result that '100 * male population / population' does, but otherwise it's pretty impressive.

Just in case you are interested Meteor:

http://www75.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=integral+of+sinx^9999

Browser crashed again

Browser crashed again

90% of lone parent housholds are headed by women
57% of these housholds are unemployed
47% of children in these households live in poverty
2 million pensioners live in poverty
in the first 3 months of 2009 the number of unemployed people in the uk was 2.22million
In the 2005 general election Labour won with only 35.3% of the vote but the lib dems won 22% of the vote but only 10% of the seats
..


on and on and on and on the statistics go rounfd my head

Depends what you want. $\int \sin^{9999} x$ or $\int \sin x^{9999}$?

The former is a nice thing which looks like it'd be fairly well approximated by a step function. The latter gave a hideous, hideous expression which included several layers of nested fractions, at least one mention of the gamma function, and which I refuse to believe is the simplest form.

I asked for the roots of the first one and it crashed on me. It also crashed when I asked for 5 iterations of the Peano space filling curve - I'm not very sure what it tried to do. I'm also not very sure how it's contriving to crash the browser - the calculations should really be done server side... Perhaps it's hanging waiting for the response.

Hahaha oh the memories of Higher Mods . Good luck! When is it btw?

Maybe there's a point where wolfram alpha thinks "screw you pesky enquirer, we're not devoting computational power to this crap" and crashes your browser

Next Monday, the pressure wasn't on today but it is now that I realise it is in 6 days and I have still to learn half of wealth, all of health the usa and central government go back over DMEs and essay practice :|

Have you had a look at what the essay questions were for the past few years? By doing that last year we managed to roughly guess what would come up, and they were all right! Don't rely totally on it but it might give you some indication like the USA topic from last year (powers of the president iirc?) isn't likely to come up again I guess.

I wouldn't worry too much about learning tons of facts for the essays though, you can totally wing it with mods I somehow managed to get full marks in paper 1 and I didn't include a huge amount of statistics, maybe 3-4 per essay.

Good luck and don't panic you can still learn loads in 6 days

Interestingly, it includes biological/medical data.

Apparently, I'm almost precisely my ideal weight and would burn 0.22 lbs of fat if I run fairly slowly (14 minute miles, which is probably around what I could sustain) for 75 minutes. Which probably makes me reasonably unfit but there you go!

out

Once these exams are over you guys have got to get out more.

SAMxxx

Do they have Wolfram Alpha there?

Actually, on consideration, maybe you wouldn't like it out here.

SAM