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How do I plot a circle centered on a city in Wolfram|Alpha?

Posted 10 years ago
Background:
I'm a little frustrated with WolframAlpha.  My experience (and I have been trying to use it ever since it launched) is that it's fine for playing around whilst modifying known working expressions, but that it is incredibly opaque whenever I want to use it with a "real world" problem.

As an example, today's xkcd has a picture of a signpost indicating 115 miles to Jackson and 98 miles to Memphis.  I thought it would be fun to try and identify where this sign post actually was, and WolframAlpha seems like the perfect tool to do so.  But I just can't get it to even ask the question.  I've tried formulating the question in plain English, but it doesn't understand, and I don't know how to represent things like "distance" or "Jackson, Mississippi" in pure mathematical code.  This is typical of my experience with WA.

So, how do I express my question such that WA understands?  And where can I get some decent documentation that would allow me to figure this out for myself?
POSTED BY: Allison Newman
2 Replies
Dear Allison I know you asked about Wolfram|Alpha, but if you will get a chance to try Wolfram Language - I wrote a post for you: Mystery location of XKCD Astronaut Vandalism sign
POSTED BY: Vitaliy Kaurov
You type
towns Jackson, Memphis

and get a lot of data, with Distance: Jackson to Memphis 310 (kilometers) as well as a step scalable map from the whole southern U.S. it's a lot and there is even more, because Standard computation time exceeded. This
distance between towns Jackson and Memphis
works too, you get the driving time, find out that they are 192.6 miles away from each other and again a (now not so nice) map. The key word seems to be towns, which makes good sense.

Because xkcd says Jackson 115 and Memphis 98 you know its a triangle and there are two solutions.
POSTED BY: Udo Krause
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