[Manifold-l] Distance calculations

[Linus F Upson III]

    Facing the hazard of taking a middle ground, oh well....

    The Manifold team has done and is doing a great job of making a fine, 
accurate scientific tool available cheaply in native MS Windows.  In this 
regard Dimitri is bang on.  And, as with any tool, if misused it can be 
dangerous.  And learning to use it fully can take time & talent.  But there 
is a middle ground which Manifold might want to explore.  Just as table saws 
have guards on them and butchers wear gauntlets, the Manifold team might 
want to dedicate some percentage of every upgrade's product to 'solutions'. 
Canned, known accurate procedures which meet an incrementally larger and 
larger number of everyday needs.  The first set should be directed to the 
newbie desires (Why afterall did this person buy a GIS?).  Later I can see 
much more complex packages to address certain  commercial or scientific 
needs.

   For me it would be great to have a tool bar for these canned solutions 
(some of which can be downloaded from the web (as is done to some extent 
already).  Really cool would be allowing for dual display of one's own 
procedure running in step with the "Manifold" solution so as to help us hone 
skills.   'Measure twice, cut once' as carpenters say.

    By the way, I was once involved in trying to assure transmission quickly 
of useable GPS information reported by people speaking different languages, 
having widely varying skills, using different GPS units (which defaulted to 
different datums etc), even using different GPS constellations (there were 
Glonass users), and on all the continents, it quickly became apparent that 
lat/lon WGS84 was THE shared approach.  Then, when analysis started,  ... 
Linus