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How to Use Google Calculator to Convert Degrees to Radians and Radians to Degrees
With a few keystrokes, you can easily take advantage of the power of Google’s built-in Calculator to convert between degrees and radians. For example, let’s say that you want to convert 60 degrees into radians, all you have to do is type 60 degrees in radians into any Google search box. Here’s what you get:
Don’t worry about giving Google a big number to handle either. It can convert degrees that are over 360. It can even convert over 10,000° into radians:
It’s just as easy to go from radians to degrees. You can type in whole numbers, numbers with decimals, and even fractions. If you have 2.25 radians and want to convert that to degrees, you could simply type 2 1/4 radians in degrees into the search box. Here’s Google Calculator’s answer:
It’s easy as pie to incorporate π into your calculations. For example, if you want to know what 3π radians is in degrees, all you have to do is type in 3pi radians in degrees. No need to even use the π symbol, just type pi.
And we end up with an anaswer of 540 degrees, which makes sense, since 1π radians is 180 degrees, and 3 x 180 is 540.
If you have any questions or comments on how these conversions have changed your life, please leave them below in the comments section!
How to Use Google Calculator to Convert Speeds
If you’ve ever taken a basic physics course, you know that the standard units that physics equations use for speed are meters per second. To many people in the world those units make perfect sense. However, for us metrically challenged Americans, it can be hard to think in metric units. Fortunately, you can let Google do the work for you.
Using Google to Convert Between Different Units of Speed
Let’s say that in a physics problem, we find that an object is moving at 14 m/s. If you have no idea how fast that is, but want to find out, all you have to do is use Google to convert it to miles per hour, which is done like this:
14 m/s in mph
That’s really all you have to do, and Google will show you how fast 14 meters per second is in miles per hour.
You can also go from the English system back to metric, as shown in the example below:
On another note, the 1992 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records reports the following:
In a speed test carried out in the Seychelles a male giant tortoise could only cover 15 feet in 43.5 sec (0.23 mph) despite the enticement of a female.
Now that’s not all impressive, but if that turtle wanted to impress his little turtle lady friend, he could boast, “Hey baby, I can walk over 378 million micrometers per hour at your enticement!” Now that sounds a lot better.
You may wonder how the turtle did all that math in his head… Well, he didn’t! He was using Google, of course!
If you have any questions on doing speed conversions or any other fun things with Google Calculator, 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 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.
