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How to Use Google Images to Identify Unfamiliar and Foreign Words
Have you ever asked someone to tell you what a certain word meant, only to be as clueless as you were before you heard their explanation? Google Images can help.
When I was in high school, I was trying to describe an armoire to one of my friends. She didn’t really understand the concept of a closet that wasn’t built into a wall. If only Google Images had existed ten years ago! All you have to do is type in the word that you aren’t sure about at the Google Images Homepage (opens in new window). Below, I typed in the word armoire.
From these photos, you can clearly tell what an armoire is. Perhaps my friend would have instantly realized what an armoire is if I could have used Google Images back then…
There are a variety of uses for this tool. For example, let’s suppose you get invited over to your new neighbor’s house for dinner and they tell you that you will be eating artichokes. If you’ve never heard of that vegetable, you can quickly get a view of it on Google Images.
Sounds like a tasty dinner!
Searching for Foreign Words
You can also find a variety of foreign words. Let’s say you are fluent in Spanish and are trying to decipher something written in Portuguese, a language very similar to Spanish. Everything is going fine and then you stumble upon the word abacaxi. All you have to do is type it into a Google Images search box, and voila:
You can be fairly certain that abacaxi means pineapple. A pretty far stretch from the spanish word piña that you are used to!
If you have any questions or comments about using Google Images to find words that you are unfamiliar with, please leave your comments below.
How to Use Google Calculator to Find Factorials
The Google Calculator can easily handle factorials.
How Do You Do Factorials With Google Calculator?
All you have to do is type in the number, followed by an exclamation point.
An example would be 5! — which gives the following results in Google:
What Can I Do With Factorials?
Many people do not understand what exactly factorials can help them with. Basically, five factorial (5!) means 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1, which gives us the answer of 120.
Factorials play a very important role in probability and statistics.
In probability, let’s say that you had five different colored balls that you were pulling out of a hat without looking. The colors are red, yellow, blue, green, and orange. Five factorial tells us that the probability of pulling out the red, then the yellow, then the blue, then the green, and finally the orange balls — all in that order — is 1 in 120, or less than 1%. There are exactly 120 combinations of orders that those balls can be pulled out of the hat in.
In statistics, let’s say that we have five children Bob, Laura, Steve, Jeff, and Liza. If we wanted to stand them all in a line, five factorial tells us that there are 120 different orders that we can have them stand in. Amazing!
Even more amazing is that if you add nine more kids to the mix, then there are over 87 billion combinations of orders that the kids can be lined up in, as shown below.
If you have any questions, feel free to comment below.
How to Use Google to Find the Population of Any Country
Google can quickly tell you how many people reside in any given country. All you have to do is know how to ask. You can ask Google how many people live in a certain country by typing the following into a Google search box:
population of [insert country here]
It’s that easy. For example, if you type in population of united states, Google tells you at the top of the search results that there are 301,139,947 people living in the USA as of July 2007. It also lets you know that this is only an estimate.
You can also see how the USA stacks up to China:
It’s interesting to note that Chile has just over 1% of the population of China…
Just for fun, I tried typing in population of antarctica. It worked! Google estimates that there are about 1,000 people living in the southernmost continent in the world, however none of them are permanent.
How to Use Google Calculator to Find the Real Size of Your Hard Drive
So you just bought a shiny new hard drive and after you turn on your computer, you notice that your 500 GB hard drive only shows up as 465 GB… If you’re wondering what’s going on, you’re not alone.
Hard drive manufacturers say that 1000 bytes equal a kilobyte, and 1000 kilobytes equal a megabyte, and so on. However, computers think in binary terms. A computer says that 1024 bytes equal a kilobyte and 1024 kilobytes equal a megabyte and so on.
This difference in counting hard drive storage really starts to make your hard drive look a lot smaller than you thought it was. The hard drive manufacturers want to advertise their hard drives to be as big as they can, so it doesn’t look like this discrepancy in what constitutes a kilobyte, etc. will change soon.
However, you can use Google to easily find out how much hard drive space you will really have when you buy a new hard drive.
I will show you how this is done in Gigabytes first, since that is the most common unit of hard drive measurement at the current time.
All you have to do is type the following into a Google search box:
[advertised hard drive size]e9 bytes in gigabytes
So an example would be 100e9 bytes in gigabytes. This example touches me personally — when I bought a new laptop a few years ago, I purchased it with a 100 GB hard drive. When I booted it up, I noticed that it was only about 93 GB. I felt jipped. However, you can see from the screen shot below that the hard drive was holding exactly as much as it should have.
At least with the 100 GB hard drive I was only missing just under seven gigabytes. However, if you were to purchase a 750 GB hard drive, you will notice that there are over 50 gigabytes missing in action.
What if My Hard Drive is Measured in Terabytes?
In order to use this feature for hard drives that are measured in terabytes, you need to change the e9 to e12. You want it to look like the example below.
As you can see, if you buy a 1.2 TB hard drive, Windows will only show that you have a 1.09 TB hard drive.
If you thought this was bad, wait until we advance to the days where hard drives are measured in yottabytes! If hard drive makers don’t change how they measure their hard drive sizes, a 100 YB hard drive will only store just over 80% of what you think it should store!
If you’re curious, we probably won’t hit that day in a very, very long time. We still have to plow through some other units of storage. Here’s the breakdown:
- 8 Bits equal 1 Byte
- 1024 Bytes equal 1 Kilobyte – KB
- 1024 Kilobytes equal 1 Megabyte – MB
- 1024 Megabytes equal 1 Gigabyte – GB
- 1024 Gigabytes equal 1 Terabyte – TB
- 1024 Terabytes equal 1 Petabyte – PB
- 1024 Petabytes equal 1 Exabyte – EB
- 1024 Exabytes equal 1 Zettabyte – ZB
- 1024 Zettabytes equal 1 Yottabyte – YB
- 1024 Yottabytes equal… Undetermined
According to this white paper (PDF file – opens in new window) by the international data corporation, all of the hard drives in the world combined are projected to hold about 1 Zettabyte in the year 2010.
How to Use Google Calculator to Find Square Roots, Cube Roots, and Bigger Roots
Google calculator is very efficient when it comes to calculating roots of numbers. The problem is that many people do not know how to make Google to perform these kinds of mathematical operations.
How to Calculate Square Roots
The official way to make Google calculate a square root is to type the following into a Google search box.
sqrt [insert number here]
For example, if you type in sqrt 16, Google will tell you the answer.
When you type in a calculator function, such as sqrt, Google by default omits search results that match the keywords/numbers entered. If you want to see the search results, Google provides a link to search results that contain the terms sqrt 16.
Although not official, Google also allows you to find the square root of a number by asking it. Below, I simply typed in what is the square root of four? and Google returns the answer.
Another method to find the square root of a number is to just type in square root [type number here].
If you want to find a cube root of a number, just type in cube root [type number here]. The of that I put in the search box below isn’t necessary.
To find larger roots, you can just type in nth root of [type number here]. Where nth represents any ordinal number such as 5th, 22nd, or 61st.
Lastly, as you can see below. Google is capable of calculating large roots of very large numbers. It is important to note that if you are looking for accuracy, Google may not be your best option here since it only gives you nine significant figures in the answer to the query below.
