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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 Moon to View Photo Stories of the Apollo Moon Landings
After completing my post on how to use Google to view the surface of the planet Mars, a reader commented that if you enjoy Google Mars, you will surely enjoy Google Moon. I have used Google Moon on occasion and I find it to be a neat tool.
Google Moon offers a variety of different tools that allow you to learn more about the surface of the moon. It also has many pictures that you can view to make the moon come to life! (Not really, but a living moon could be pretty fun… really… think about it.)
When you first go to Google Moon, you will notice that it opens up to the following page:
Google Moon centers around providing a rich, illustrative experience to its end users. As you can see, it has Moon photos for all of the Apollo missions that have successfully landed on the moon.
If you click on the Zoom in in the Apollo 11 speech bubble, you can see the Apollo 11 landing area in more detail.
As you can see there are 18 photos that you can view. Just click on any of the red pointers, or any of the photos at the bottom of the screen. I clicked on the American Flag photo (the 7th from the left) because it looked pretty interesting.
Upon clicking on a marker, you can view the photo and zoom in or move it around with your mouse. I zoomed in on the flag.
If you want to explore other Apollo missions, all you have to do is click on the Apollo Series link in the bottom left hand corner. I then selected Apollo 17, as you can see below.
From here you can view photos of the Apollo 17 mission, or go back and choose another mission.
If you have any questions about using Google Moon to view photos of the Apollo space missions, just leave a comment and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks for reading!
How to Use Google Maps to View a World Map of Recent Earthquakes
Google has created a number of so-called “Map Mashups” where they merge their maps with other significant data. In this case, they have merged a world map with data on where recent earthquakes have happened as well as their strength on the Richter scale.
How Do I View the Earthquake Map?
The map of recent earthquakes can be viewed by clicking here. Here is what you will see:
As you can see, this map tells you the strength of the earthquakes and when they occurred. It doesn’t show scales that were under a magnitude four because those simply aren’t as exciting.
Yellow earthquakes occurred in the past week, orange in the past day, and if you’re lucky enough to be viewing right after one has occurred, you will see a red dot for earthquakes that have happened in the last hour. Have fun!
Another Way To Access This Data
You can also access this map as well as many other maps that Google has made available (some of which we will feature in the future) by going to the Google Maps Directory.
Here is a screen shot of the Google Maps Directory:
From here, you can choose any one of the four categories on the left hand side of the screen to browse the different maps.
I have found it easier to just search for a certain map that I’m looking for in the search box at the top of the screen.
If you have any questions about these enhanced Google Maps, just leave your words below.
How to Use Google Yellowpages to Find Any Local Business
Category: Google Maps, Google Phonebook · Comment on this Article
Last month, I wrote about using Google as Your Whitepages phonebook. Today, I am going to describe how you can use Google as your Yellowpages as well.
Although Google seems to be an abstract company, they know about businesses that are just around the corner to where you live! All you have to do is think of a business category and then type in your location. You can use just a zip code, or a city and state.
For example, when my wife and I moved to Pittsburgh, we wanted to find out about the local pizzerias. All I had to do was type pizza, 15216 into a Google search box. Here’s what I got:
As you can see, Google shows me a map of my local area and then shows me where each pizzeria is located. This is nice, as I can quickly see which ones are closest to where I live. Google also lists the website and phone number of each establishment.
At the bottom of this page is a link that says More results near Pennsylvania 15216 >> If I click on this, I am taken to a more in-depth page of my results.
Here is what that in-depth page looks like:
This page gives you more information about some of the pizzerias. You will notice that Google now offers to give you driving directions to any one of these pizza kitchens.
You’ll also notice that for some of the businesses, Google displays reviews that other internet users have written. For example, on the last business a reviewer says she “saw a lady drop a tomatoe on the floor and pick it up and put it in someones salad.” I’ll be sure to avoid that place — especially if a tomatoe is a cross between a toe and a tomato. That doesn’t sound good at all.
At the very top of this page, you’ll find that Google has opened up a little Find businesses tab for you that you can use to find most any business. If you would like to access a Google Find businesses page for yourself without going through a standard Google search box, click here.
To show the power of the Google Yellowpages, let’s try searching for a medical profession in a remote area of the USA. We’ll try dentists in Provo, Utah. Here’s what we get:
This page looks similar to the previous one. I performed one more search just to demonstrate the power and versatility of Google’s Yellowpages.
You may notice that once you get through a few pages of results that they aren’t really relevant to what you searched for. This seems to happen on all searches. After all, you’ll notice that Google found 1,843 dentists in Provo…
Go ahead and try searching in your own city!
How to Use Google to Perform a Wildcard Search Using the Asterisk *
Using an asterisk (the * symbol) in your searches can add quite a bit of power to what you are able to find. Not many people are aware of this, but the asterisk can substitute for any word, or a number of words in your Google search. To see how this can be useful, check out some of the examples below.
Using the Wildcard to Find the Length of a Marathon
Let’s say that you want to find out how long a marathon is. All you have to do is type “a marathon is * miles long” into Google, and it will match phrases that contain that phrase with a something between is and miles, which should be our answer.
Since we were pretty specific, you can see that we only got 280 results, but the first four results seem to indicate unanimously that a marathon is 26.2 miles long.
It is remarkably easy to use Google to find out answers to questions without even going past the results page. As you can see, Google found our answer and displayed it for us on the results page.
Using the Wildcard to Find the Weight of a Macbook Air
Let’s say you’ve gotten tired of lugging around your six pound laptop. If you are curious as to how much the new Macbook Air weighs, all you have to do is type “macbook air weighs * pounds” into Google and you’ll get your answer.
As you can see, the general consensus among all three pages is that the Macbook Air weighs exactly 3.0 pounds.
It is always a good practice when doing searches like the above two to make sure that all of the pages agree. Keep in mind that this is the internet, and anybody can post whatever they want — fact or fiction.
Using the Wildcard to Find Thomas Edison’s Inventions
If you want to easily find out some of the amazing things that Thomas Edison invented in his lifetime, all you have to do is type thomas edision invented the *, and Google will return pages telling you what Thomas Edison was responsible for inventing.
As you can see, we find out from the first five results that Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, the incadescent lightbulb, the Quadraplex telegraph, and that he had a hand in inventing the modern alkaline battery.
Using the Wildcard to Find Celebrities’ Middle Names
The wildcard character can also be used to find many celebrities’ middle names. Let’s say you’re wondering what Barack Obama’s middle name is. It is normally not mentioned in public — not even an initial. All you have to do is type in barack * obama.
This tells Google to find Barack Obama, but to find something between those two names. In this case, the only logical thing that would come between his first and last name, would be his middle name.
From the first four search results, it is evident that Barack Obama’s middle name is Hussein.
In contrast, when you just perform a Google search for Barack Obama, no mention of the middle name Hussein is made, not even in his website’s Meet the Candidate section:
Using the Wildcard to Find Song Lyrics
Everytime I listen to the song Superman by Five For Fighting, I can never quite understand what he is saying near the end. It sounds like he says: I’m only a man with some moldy red cheese lookin’ for kryptonite.
That never quite made sense to me, and I was sure that I had the lyrics wrong. Fortunately, I decided to figure out what the real lyrics are. I did that using Google by typing in I’m only a man * kryptonite. I typed in only the lyrics that I was sure of. I knew that he sang I’m only a man, and that he ended with the word kryptonite, so that’s what I tried.
Without even going to another web page, I can plainly see what he sings in search results 2-4. What he really sings is I’m only a man in a silly red sheet Digging for kryptonite… Now I can unabashedly sing along in front of my friends!
Using the Wildcard to Find People’s Preferences
Let’s say you want to know a little more about internet users’ favorite colors. You can try typing in “my favorite color is *”. As you can see, I get a mix of results.
If you’re really bored, you could go through and count the number of times a color is mentioned to formulate some statistics on the favorite color of cyberspace… or not.
Conclusion
As you can see, the wildcard operator really has too many uses to mention here. Its uses are only limited by your imagination.
If you can think of more useful or clever ways to use the wildcard, please post them below in the comments section.