Update: People are reporting all sorts of weird interpretations by Siri; read the note below.
This morning I needed to look up what the most expensive-to-produce album of all time was. (It’s For A Tweet™.) Then, I had to convert that to today’s dollars - a good idea whenever you’re looking at prices of anything older than a few years. My usual method is to google “inflation calculator”, then use whatever comes up first. Usually it’s a page where you put in the amount and pick what year’s money you’d like to see in what other year; “How much would five million of today’s dollars buy in 1982?”
Since I was on my iPhone at the time, I figured it would be neat to have a quick, well done app for inflation calculation. There are already some rough-around-the-everything ones in the store, and a nicer one could be done.
But then I thought… Is there an even faster way? Siri is good friends with Wolfram Alpha, and if anyone can calculate this, he can. Could I just ask? I could, but there was a wrinkle: how exactly do you phrase it? I imagine you’d try some of these, as I did:
- How much is 5 million of today’s dollars in 1982?
- What is 5 million 2011 dollars in 1982?
- In 1982, what was 5 million of 2011’s dollars worth?
Unfortunately, these don’t work; the parser isn’t quite sure what I’m getting at. I don’t blame it; it’s not an immediately clear concept to humans either!
Here’s my solution that works for any two years you’d like to compare:
- How much is five dollars in 2011 in 1982?
(Note that you can say “today” instead of “in 2011”.) To a human, the double “in” appears a bit funky, but Wolfram Alpha parses it correctly. “Five dollars in 2011”, “in 1982 dollars”.
If you don’t have an iPhone 4S, try this query in Wolfram Alpha; it won’t work in Google’s calculator, I’m afraid. Siri is still the fastest way, so I hope you can try that.
Update: It looks like Siri and/or Wolfram Alpha don’t return predictable results. People tell me that the recommended query above, even when parsed right, returns things like length conversions and hotel searches. My guess is that this is due to Siri’s contextual awareness of your previous searches, your location, and whatever the servers had for breakfast. It’s fantastic that Siri is a cloud service because it can be improved behind the scenes, but it also means it’s difficult for us users to share tricks and subtleties of Siri phrasing. Which would be very handy, since Siri is still so sensitive to how we word things to her.