Re: Computers - and astronomy teaching software

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca>]

> What I have, for example, is a significant number of investment programs
> that are not available for the Mac.  Software drives hardware.  A major
> reason I purchased my first Apple was the "killer app" of Visa Calc.

Ah, investment programs! You're investing, maybe, in credit cards?
I've not heard of Visa Calc. Do you mean, maybe, Visicalc?

It does not surprise me that a person who uses only a small fraction of
all the software that exists in the world, or who owns and uses only a
subset of all the machines that exist, might be unfamiliar with the
entire gamut of software that exists in the world for all the machines
in the world. For a physicist to make the cognitive error of extra-
polating from a position in such an evidently undersampled subspace to
conclude that there is by some objective (and therefore quantitative)
standard "more" software available for one platform than another is, to
me, disappointing. That error is more typically found in the domain of
a true believer than of a critical thinker. Such a statement reveals
what we all knew from the beginning: this discussion is, at its roots,
religious. Quantifying "more" on a multidimensional space with an
undefined metric is a hopeless exercise, and that is what this error
amounts to.

All that rhetoric is preamble to suggesting to those who use Macintosh
machines that there exists a new planetarium application which blows
all others away. It is called "Starry Night", and it must be seen in
action to be believed. I own version 2.0 with the full Hubble guide
star catalog, software for driving a telescope, and almost every
feature you could imagine wanting (please let me know what you think
is missing). A shareware version of "Starry Night" is available from
http://www.siennasoft.com

Now in my idiometric opinion (as a teacher of introductory astronomy)
knowing this application exists and that it is inaccessible from
anything with Intel Inside (a blatantly sexual slogan if there ever
was one) makes the software available for the Mac far "more" than that
available for PCs. If I were an accountant who cared greatly about
investment programs (I freely confess no knowledge of them) then the
argument advanced above might have some weight.

Leigh