WolframAlpha: can't get enough of it

Fifty Questions for Wolfram Alpha
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Wonderful hand-drawn maps

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Last month, I asked Slate readers to send me their hand-drawn maps . The request was part of my series on signs , the tools that professionals use to orient us and direct us from point A to point B. But official signs aren't the only things that help us get around. Since early man first drew on his cave wall—including marks that some scholars argue were maps of local rivers and settlements—we've been sketching out routes to guide one another to the market and to the mountain top. These humble maps can be beautiful. They can also be messy, indecipherable, inaccurate, and unattractive. Slate readers sent in nearly 200 maps, and they ranged from hasty scribbles on scrap paper to elaborate, multicolored renderings. No matter what it looks like, a handmade map offers several advantages over a road atlas or the directions you get from Google. Read on to see some of your most interesting hand-drawn maps—and to discover why homemade maps are often superior to the ones d...
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Translating Les Misérables

Why the new English translation of Victor Hugo's masterpiece is 100,000 words longer than its best-known predecessor In the preface to her bold new translation of Les Misérables, Julie Rose states that Victor Hugo wrote his novel “standing in the room he’d nicknamed ‘the lookout’ at the top of Hauteville House, on the isle of Guernsey”. In fact, much of the novel had already been completed when Hugo fled from Paris, disguised as a worker, after Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état of December 2, 1851. A bulky manuscript titled “Les Misères”, begun in 1845, had survived the invasion of Hugo’s house by insurgents in 1848, and then the flight of the banished author to Brussels, London, Jersey and, finally, Guernsey. It was in the sun-baked, wind-blasted “look-out” that “Les Misères” ballooned into the ten-volume epic that Hugo called “the social and historical drama of the nineteenth century”. Les Misérables was published from April 3 to June 30, 1862, by which time nine translations were ne...
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