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Computing Exact Uncertainties—Physical Constants in the Current and in the New SI

Introduction

In the so-called "new SI," the updated version of the International System of Units that will define the seven base units (second, meter, kilogram, ampere, kelvin, mole and candela) and that goes into effect May 20 of 2019, all SI units will be definitionally based on exact values of fundamental constants of physics. And as a result, all the named units of the SI (newton, volt, ohm, pascal, etc.) will ultimately be expressible through fundamental constants. (Finally, fundamental physics will be literally ruling our daily life 😁.)

Here is how things will change from the evening of Monday, May 20, to the morning of Tuesday, May 21, of this year.

Michael Trott, Chief Scientist, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Computation & Analysis

Peppa Pig, Tracking Meteorite Trajectory and Computational Linguistics: Wolfram Community Highlights

Over the past 16 weeks, Wolfram Community has gained over 1,000 new members—surpassing 21,000 members total! We’ve also seen more activity, with 800,000 pageviews and 160,000 new readers in that time period. We enjoy seeing the interesting and unique projects Wolfram Language users come up with and are excited to share some of the posts that make Wolfram Community a favorite platform for sharing, socializing and networking.
Chapin Langenheim, Editor & Web Project Coordinator, Project Management
Computation & Analysis

3D Printing “Spikey” Commemorative Coins with the Wolfram Language

I approached my friend Frederick Wu and suggested that we should make a physical Wolfram Spikey Coin (not to be confused with a Wolfram Blockchain Token!) for the celebration of the 30th anniversary of Mathematica. Frederick is a long-term Mathematica user and coin collector, and together, we challenged ourselves to design our own commemorative coin for such a special event.

The iconic Spikey is a life-long companion of Mathematica, coined (no pun intended) in 1988 with the release of Version 1. Now, we’ve reached a time in which Wolfram technologies and different 3D printing processes happily marry together to make this project possible!
Shenghui Yang, Developer, Wolfram|Alpha Localization Systems
Education & Academic

Shattering the Plane with Twelve New Substitution Tilings Using 2, φ, ψ, χ, ρ

Similar Triangle Dissections

Version 12 of the Wolfram Language introduces solvers for geometry problems. The documentation for the new function GeometricScene has a neat example showing the following piece of code, with GeometricAssertion calling for seven similar triangles:

[Wolfram_Notebook_Download]
&#10005 o=Sequence[Opacity[.9],EdgeForm[Black]];plasticDissection=RandomInstance[GeometricScene[{a,b,c,d,e,f,g},{ a=={1,0},e=={0,0},Line[{a,e,d,c}], p0==Polygon[{a,b,c}], p1==Style[Polygon[{b,d,c}],Orange,o], p2==Style[Polygon[{d,f,e}],Yellow,o], p3==Style[Polygon[{b,f,d}],Blue,o], p4==Style[Polygon[{g,f,b}],Green,o], p5==Style[Polygon[{e,g,f}],Magenta,o], p6==Style[Polygon[{a,e,g}],Purple,o], GeometricAssertion[{p0,p1,p2,p3,p4,p5,p6},"Similar"]}],RandomSeeding->28]
Ed Pegg Jr, Scientific Information Editor, Scientific Information Group
Computation & Analysis

Computing in 128 Characters: Winners of the 2018 Wolfram Employees One-Liner Competition

Every year at the Wolfram Technology Conference, attendees take part in the One-Liner Competition, a contest to see who can do the most astounding things with 128 characters of Wolfram Language code. Wolfram employees are not allowed to compete out of fairness to our conference visitors, but nevertheless every year I get submissions and requests to submit from my colleagues that I have to reject. To provide an outlet for their eagerness to show how cool the software is that they develop, this year we organized the first internal One-Liner Competition.

We awarded first-, second- and third-place prizes as well as six honorable mentions and one dishonorable mention. And the winners are...
Christopher Carlson, Senior User Interface Developer, User Interfaces
Computation & Analysis

Let’s Tango: Computational Musicology Using Wikidata, MusicBrainz and the Wolfram Language

Imagine you could import any website to obtain meaningful data for further processing, like creating a diagram, highlighting places on a map or integrating with other data sources. What if you could query data on the web knowing only one simple query language? That’s the vision of the semantic web. The semantic web is based on standards like the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and SPARQL (a query language for RDF). The upcoming release of Version 12 of the Wolfram Language introduces experimental support for interacting with the semantic web: you will be able to Import and Export a variety of RDF data formats as well as query remote SPARQL endpoints and in-memory data using either a query string or a symbolic representation of SPARQL.

Toni Schindler, Wolfram|Alpha Scientific Content
Computation & Analysis

Deploying and Sharing: Web Scraping with the Wolfram Language, Part 3

So far in this series, I’ve covered the process of extracting, cleaning and structuring data from a website. So what does one do with a structured dataset? Continuing with the Election Atlas data from the previous post, this final entry will talk about how to store your scraped data permanently and deploy results to the web for universal access and sharing.

Brian Wood, Technical Communications & Outreach Manager
Announcements & Events

The Wolfram Technology Conference 2018 Livecoding Championship: A Recap

For the third year in a row, the annual Wolfram Technology Conference played host to a new kind of esport—the Livecoding Championship. Expert programmers competed to solve challenges with the Wolfram Language, with the goal of winning the championship tournament belt and exclusive bragging rights. This year I had the honor of composing the competition questions, in addition to serving as live commentator alongside trusty co-commentator (and Wolfram's lead communications strategist) Swede White. You can view the entire recorded livestream of the event here—popcorn not included.
Jesse Friedman, Software Engineer, Engine Connectivity Engineering
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