I fly a lot. Talks, meetings, whatever. I usually prefer an aisle seat, because then the rude guy who smells funny and spreads over 1.8 seats only irritates me on one side, and I’m not wedged up against the window.
However, sometimes I do like to grab a window seat, especially if I’m flying near sunset, or over a particularly interesting landscape (flying over southern Utah near sunset will change your life). But even then, the landscape blows past, and eventually you wind up flying over eastern Colorado, and there’s nothing to see but flat, flat land, extending all the way to the horizon.
And as I gaze over the amber waves of grain to the line that divides land and sky, I sometimes wonder how far away that line is. The horizon is a semi-mythical distance, used in poetry as a metaphor for a philosophical division of some kind. But in fact it’s a real thing, and the distance to it can be determined. All it takes is a little knowledge of geometry, and a diagram to show you the way.
Follow along with me here. We’re going to find the lost horizon.
