Today’s theme: recommendations of websites where you can download software to satisfy your intellectual curiosity and imagination, and let you experience some aspect of reality.
I’ve mentioned Fractint before, but it fits this theme (an experience of mathematical reality) so I’ll mention it in passing again.
The planetarium software StarStrider is well worth a look, although my assessment of version 2.8 is that it’s very promising but not quite good enough to pay for (I am eagerly awaiting version 3.0, which I might well purchase). As long as your system is compatible, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t accept the 30-day trial and form your own opinion of version 2.8.
[Update: I later bought StarStrider, and you can read more about what I've done with it here and here.]
The Periodical Historical Atlas of Europe contains a map of Europe for each century, showing with 100-year intervals how the political composition of Europe has changed. The online maps have the lowest resolution, the downloadable maps have intermediate resolution, and the purchasable maps have the highest resolution. Quite enlightening.
P. S. Neeley’s reconstructions of ancient board games are interesting, although flawed in various ways (I’ll need another paragraph to elaborate). It’s fun to imagine that you’re playing games from ancient civilisations, but wise to remember that the rules are largely guesswork and sometimes just made up. (I reserve a particularly large pinch of salt for cases where games from completely different continents are suspiciously similar, although Patolli is my favourite as a game in its own right, wherein I always bet four.)
Unfortunately, the games contain many bugs which are in some cases annoying, and in others, crippling. For example, Mehen looked interesting in theory but was completely unplayable (in part because poor colour contrast made it impossible to see the components properly, and in part because the dialogue box for selecting players was impenetrably complicated - I couldn’t work it out, and gave up). Among the games that are actually playable are Senet, Bul, Patolli, and The Royal Game of Ur - but even these contain annoyances. One annoyance is that the menu bars are often disabled or unresponsive, and another is that the games wrest control over your mouse pointer, moving it around without your consent (particularly annoying if you’re trying to reach for the menu bar). When all’s said, though, the games might be buggy but at least they’re small, so trying them doesn’t cost you much in disk space or download time (but when you delete them, don’t forget to delete the .ini file that each game stores in your Windows directory).
