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^^^^
When I wrote that naming stars is like bird-watching, I was thinking
of Feynman's essay in which he distinguishes between knowing only the name
of a bird, and knowing about the bird...its habits, behavior, diet, etc.,
and how the latter is preferable to the former. Feynman argues that you can
know a lot about a bird without knowing its proper name. Yes, counting
populations of birds, or stars, has been invaluable to science. Casual
bird-watching, and amateur astronomy, has benefitted science greatly.
Which brings up the
practical difficulty of teaching star-naming to 125 students in a daytime
class located 200 miles from the nearest planetarium in an area where it's
cloudy most of the time. Therefore, I decided not to ...