{"id":1313,"date":"2009-05-18T22:47:54","date_gmt":"2009-05-18T21:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=1313"},"modified":"2009-05-18T22:47:54","modified_gmt":"2009-05-18T21:47:54","slug":"use-wolfram-alpha-to-lose-weight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=1313","title":{"rendered":"Use Wolfram Alpha to lose weight."},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: left;\">I apologise to any of my regular readers who may be tired of all of the Wolfram Alpha updates but I am pulling an all-nighter at the office and whenever I find myself waiting for my main computer to finish what it is doing, I end up feeding queries to Wolfram Alpha.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">From the beginning, I knew that Wolfram Alpha knows about the calorie content of a lot of foods.\u00a0 If you walpha <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolframalpha.com\/input\/?i=snickers+bar\">snickers bar<\/a> for example you get quite a lot of information including the following.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"\/images\/walpha\/big\/walpha_snickers.png\" alt=\"Calories in a snickers bar \" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">OK, so you are on a diet and you&#8217;ve just given in and eaten a snickers bar.  Now you have calorie guilt and you want to know how much you have to run to burn it all off and break even.  Walpha the term <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wolframalpha.com\/input\/?i=exercise+calories+burned\">exercise calories burned<\/a> and you&#8217;ll get quite a large set of results including a set of editable input boxes similar to the screenshot below.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"\/images\/walpha\/big\/walpha_exercise.png\" alt=\"Calories burned for a 5km run\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">The input parameters refer to my run on the treadmill yesterday and I see that I burned 408 Calories according to Wolfram Alpha.  Actually this is in complete agreement with the readout on the treadmill so whatever model they are using &#8211; they agree with each other.\u00a0 Put another way, my 5km run is worth almost one and a half snickers bars.\u00a0 On reflection, however, maybe I need to lay off the snickers bars because Wolfram alpha also tells me that my <a href=\"http:\/\/www25.wolframalpha.com\/input\/?i=body+mass+index\">body mass index<\/a> is a little on the high side. Ho hum&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">What I find cool about these input boxes is that you can use any units you like.\u00a0 I used kilometers per hour but could have chosen miles per hour or a pace of 8 minutes per mile.\u00a0 Heck, I even put my <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Parsec\">height in parsecs<\/a> and it just got on with the calculation. Wolfram Alpha also has a guess at how quickly I might run a marathon based on my current fitness using the Riegel and Cameron models.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve never run a marathon so couldn&#8217;t possibly comment on its accuracy.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"\/images\/walpha\/big\/walpha_run_predictions.png\" alt=\"Calories burned for a 5km run\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I apologise to any of my regular readers who may be tired of all of the Wolfram Alpha updates but I am pulling an all-nighter at the office and whenever I find myself waiting for my main computer to finish what it is doing, I end up feeding queries to Wolfram Alpha. From the beginning, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wolfram-alpha"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-lb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1313"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1329,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1313\/revisions\/1329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}