Wolfram Alpha a Google Killer? Not... Supposed... To... Be

I'm getting tired of reading about whether Alpha is a Google-killer. I've seen Stephen Wolfram's presentations a couple of times; he's quite careful to say that it isn't. There's a fundamental difference that many people out there are just missing. Google is a search engine. Alpha looks like a search engine, but it isn't; it's all about curated data, and the analysis of that data.

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Hacking Primes in Mathematica

If this is too esoteric, skip it. I couldn't figure out anywhere else to put it.

This morning, Tim Bray tweeted about a post on prime numbers and Benford's law. To cut the esoterica short, one of the big problems in prime numbers is that people don't know how they're distributed. This post suggests that Benford's Law describes the distribution of the first digit of prime numbers. One of the comments asked an important question: is this really just an artifact of base 10? Math really doesn't "know anything" about bases, so if this idea doesn't generalize to bases other than 10, it doesn't mean much.

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