Performing unit conversion queries using Google's search box.

Imagine if you could that offline, or even be able to have this functionality available to incorporate it in scripts or other programs as well. Imagine you could have this functionality as an extension in Mac’s AlfredApp.

Introducing Metric: A Unit Conversion Library for Java

I needed this functionality to develop an extension for Alfred, the most wonderful Mac launcher, and I wanted it to work offline, without having to retrieve the results from Google or another online source. So I created a Java library that’s capable of performing unit conversion queries expressed in natural English. I called it simply Metric, made it open source, and published it on Github. You can clone it, fork it, play with it or contribute back if you will. The code is fairly well documented and organized. The library includes some supporting sub-libraries that may be used independently in other projects, including a plural/singular inflector for the English language.

Metric meets Alfred

The original goal of developing a library like Metric was to use it as an Alfred extension. Alfred (http://www.alfredapp.com/) is a wonderful productivity application for Mac, much like Quicksilver or Google’s Quick Search Box, but  a little bit better in my opinion. You can grab a copy of Metric as an Alfred extension here. After you install this extension, you can type unit conversion queries on Alfred using cv as keyword.

Performing a unit conversion query with Alfred

This Alfred extension shows the results of the conversion using Growl, but I guess if you already have a Mac chances are that you Growl installed. If not, you can get it here.

Links and resources

• Metric source code repository on Github
• Unit Conversion extension for AlfredApp
• Alfred App and Growl

Wolfram Alpha homepage

Wolfram Research has released a few weeks ago what could be the first instance of a computational knowledge engine, Wolfram Alpha. By a computational knowledge engine I mean a computing system in which we provide questions in natural language and receive meaningful and correct answers derived from internal knowledge and immense data-banks.

According to the project’s about page

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

As you can see, this is a work in progress. The system still has shortcomings, but it can already interpret and answer correctly many questions from a very diverse range of topics, that are not only limited to exact sciences.

Here are some examples of funny or insightful questions that amused me for a while…

• What is Wolfram Alpha?, What is your name? or Who are you?
• Where are you? and Where am I?
• What is my name? and My name is Ernesto
• What’s the second largest country in the world?
• Milk and apple juice or Milk vs apple juice

And before I finish, just as a curiosity, I asked Wolfram Alpha the last question a few minutes ago…

How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?

Unfortunately, there’s still insufficient data for a meaningful answer. The people behind this project have still a lot of work to do.

Kudos for all your great work and for this fine product!