Wolfram|Alpha (also WolframAlpha and Wolfram Alpha) is an answer-engine developed by British physicist, mathematician, author and businessman Stephen Wolfram and his Wolfram Research team.  The online service with a new approach to knowledge extraction was launched last week.  Still in its infancy, perhaps the engine should be titled Wolfram Beta.   Be as it may, Wolfram Alpha answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages.  Want to know the distance from San Francisco to Tokyo?  How about the path of Hurricane Dolores?  Find the answers to questions that aren’t written on web pages, “what is the current position of the Hubble Telescope?

In March 2009, Wolfram announced Wolfram|Alpha, a computational data engine with a new approach to knowledge extraction and an easy-to-use interface, launched on May 16, 2009.  The engine is based on natural language processing, a large library of algorithms and an NKS approach to answering queries.  The Wolfram|Alpha engine is not a search engine in that it does not simply return a list of results based on a query (like Google or Yahoo), but it instead attempts to compute an answer to its input.

Wolfram Alpha is particularly useful for scientific questions, no more searching random webpages; Wolfram pumps out all the data the first time around.

Like most of the world, I was overwhelmed with emotion last Tuesday night when the people of the United States elected Barack Obama for president.

Wow! How’s that for poetic irony. Just when we thought we were helplessly enslaved by an administration of nearly insane, power-starved, mostly-white, science-rejecting megalomaniacs, in walks a smart-talking, free-thinking black man to emancipate us.

Also, I have been taking extra pleasure in pondering all those hardcore racists out there who must be quite aghast as they watch black people on TV dancing in the streets and sobbing tears of joy. In my fantasy, I imagine some skinhead knucklehead pacing in his living room, muttering racial epithets to himself. Perhaps there is a shotgun in his closet, perhaps he will put the shotgun in his mouth. This is my fantasy, so it ends my way.

Yes, Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, was a day when you truly felt proud to be an American. But then, on Nov. 5, I read something that changed all that.

I read that California’s black voters favored Proposition 8 by a margin of 70 percent to 30 percent, which means seven out of 10 black voters voted against gay marriage, which means seven out of 10 black voters suck major ass.

And yes, I’m quite certain some of you are going to call me a bigot for saying so, but I don’t care because that would just be the black calling the kettle black. I mean, I knew African-Americans leaned toward a homophobic mindset, what with all the Bible thumping and gospel singing, but 70-30? In California!? I had no idea it would be so lopsided.

And because Prop. 8 passed by only a 5-percent margin, and given that black voters came out in droves for this historic election, it probably means those 70-percenters were the determining factor in 8’s passage.

That is disappointing on so many levels.

Because, now, when I watch the news and see a black commentator on some talk show holding back the tears and talking ’bout, “We’ve come a long way, baby,” I can’t help but wonder if that person is one of the 70-percenters. I can’t help but think, Hey, man, was it you who had the audacity to vote yes on Proposition Hate? How could you!? How, after all these decades of demanding equality, can you then turn around and deny it to those who are next in line? Even President-elect Obama is against gay marriage, which breaks my heart. In his defense, though, he did say he was pro-civil unions (that grant equal protections), which is cool, I guess, but not the reality. Domestic partnerships are not the same as marriage. Not in California, anyway. They are sorely lacking certain important provisions such as inheritance, adoptive and visitation rights. But, even if domestic partnerships were to become legally identical to marriage, well, it still isn’t right. That’d be like saying, “OK, look, you are not permitted to drink from the white water fountain, but don’t worry because we believe in equality, too, so we made the black water fountain exactly the same as the white one. Is that cool? Cool.”

In other words, it’s Separate but Equal: The Sequel .

So, sorry—no, not cool. Everyone drinks from the same goddamn fountain. That’s the rule. That’s what the Constitution says. That’s the $64,000 answer to a motherfucking 10-cent question. Or did I read the Declaration of Independence wrong? Let me check. Oh look, see, turns out I did read it wrong. I missed the parenthetical remarks:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (who are not queer) are created equal, and endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness (except queers, silly, what were you thinking?).”

Yeah, right, silly me.

Anyway, I’d like to finish the column the same way it began, with a bit of irony, though this time considerably less poetic.

The constitutional principles that should have rejected a ban on gay marriage in 2008 are the same principles that rejected bans on interracial marriage in 1967. Before then, anti-miscegenation (also called “racial integrity”) laws were still on the books in many states. Thankfully, Hawaii was not one of them. But if it were, if the Hawaii courts and the Hawaii populace had not rejected these medieval bans on interracial sexual contact, well, there would probably be no such thing as a Barack Obama, himself the son of a black man and a white woman. Or, if his parents lived in Alabama, Mississippi or any of the other 16 states that deploringly held on to their racial-integrity laws till the bitter end, well, he probably wouldn’t be alive because it would’ve been illegal for his parents to marry and make babies.

And all those homosexuals who have been supporting the black civil-rights movement since the ’60s (and support they most certainly did!) unknowingly shot themselves in the foot by helping clear a path for a black presidential candidate in 2008, which attracted more African-Americans to the polls than ever, and they then overwhelmingly voted yes on Prop. Hate, thereby keeping bigotry alive in well in America.

So to all you 70-Percenters out there—spare me the tears. You haven’t come a long way, baby; you’re right back where you started from, at the front lines of oppression. The only difference is that now you’re the oppressor instead of the oppressed. You are voluntarily pissing on the grave of Martin Luther King Jr. You’re a hypocrite and a sellout. I beg of you, 70-Percenters, change your minds and hearts now. Godspeed.

P.S. To all you 30-Percenters out there, way to go. Much respect. Out.    

-Written by By Edwin Decker from the San Diego City Beat