Stellar Parallax and the Prairie

My normal route to work is farmland mostly, and flat as far as the eye can see.
Yesterday it was my turn to open the shop, so I was driving that way just before dawn. What stood out visually were the silos in the near distance and the watertowers on the horizon. Blink--two fingers apart...blink--one!

("Hold out a pencil at arm's length so that it covers your view of a more distant object. Now close each eye in turn. The pencil seems to move relative to the distant object when a different eye is closed. Each eye looks at the pencil from a slightly different direction. With both eyes open you get more visual clues as to how far away any object is.")

http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~mjp/parallax.html

LOL...and THAT made me think of Sr. Roderick, my high school Earth Science teacher. The subject fascinated me then, and still does. Str'Roderick was one of those clear teachers...she knew her subject thoroughly and wanted to pass that knowledge on. She wasn't a fanatic or giddy about Earth Science, she just saw the value of knowing.
We did fossils, plants, the night sky, rocks and sediment deposits, oceans and tides (and tsunamis), glaciers, rain and wind, chemical reactions....and one concept was bound to the others with examples.
Maybe that's where the idea of 'variations on a theme' gelled for me..the concept of "water" was a variation on what worked with ice, lava, blood in a vein, heat, chaos, electricity...so if you understood one, you had a toe-hold in the others.
I've found also that relationships with people work that way, too.

But right now, I need to go to work....to be continued...lol