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Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know that Alpha can tell you what planes are currently visible overhead, holy crap, that's awesome!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=planes%20above

Ran the query and looked at the sky like an idiot, only birds! And it's pretty clear today, too. Can the flight schedules be that off?

Also learned how many calories a cubic light-year of milk chocolate is: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/qisot/im_stephen_wolfr...

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You can do the same thing for satellites and stars (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=satellites+overhead)

You can answer a lot of cool questions with Alpha. Nutritional information for 1/2 an avacado? It can do that. Number of kilobytes in a petabyte? Yup.

Overall, very cool tool.

I use it occasionally for word finding, like a friend who wanted a clever .me domain I pointed to: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=words+ending+in+me

Also, you can use that same idea to cheat at Scrabble (or any variant), though I would never condone such a thing ;)

If you like that, try http://morewords.com.

  grep me$ /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l
  1699

(WolframAlpha: 210)

It can also do "satellites above": http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sattelites+above Make sure you enable interactivity (if you have Pro) on that last graph, it's pretty amazing.

Jesus, that needs to be a mobile app "Whats above [x] Planes, [x] Satellites [ ] Stars"

That's awesome!

They exist for the iPhone, not sure about Android

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