Dear Michael,
I don’t know what prompted your unexpected objection to the mathematics in a couple of recent posts. Maybe you had a spat with your wife/mistress, maybe you have diarrhea, or, more likely, you feared having to admit the math was above your head. Whatever your rationale, you actually have a point with some validity. I think it was Stephen Hawking who said that he had been advised that every equation he included in his popular books would decrease the readership very significantly.
With that in mind, I still feel that occasionally there is a time and place for the minimum possible use of mathematics in the defense of an idea. This was such a time.
With due respect to The Barbarian’s commendation on your saying you would actually go to Bear Mountain and see if the NYC skyline is visible, I think that is both insufficient and unnecessary. It is unnecessary because there is no dispute that you can see the New York City skyline from the crest of Bear Mountain. The TripAdvisor website that Daniel1611 linked to has a picture taken from the top of Bear Mountain showing the New York skyline in the distance. Daniel1611 knows that, and I know that. Daniel has not suggested that TripAdvisor is in collusion with NASA in falsifying pictures dealing with the shape of the earth, and I am not a conspiracy theorist myself.
It is Daniel’s contention that the New York skyline should not be visible from Bear Mountain if the earth is spherical. My mathematics shows that even with a spherical earth, the NYC skyline will be visible. So going there and seeing the NYC skyline is going to tell us nothing that we don’t already agree on – you can see NYC from Bear Mountain. Now if you have another suggestion that is free of mathematics, I am all ears, but I am not going to hold my breath.
BTW, Michael - different subject – you may notice that often when I quote back portions of your posts, the quoted portion is not in the fancy font or color you chose for your original post. Even after more than a year since Alwight showed you the basics of how to use the reply features and color and fonts, you seem like a little kid who has recently found a box of crayons, and are still coloring on the walls, the furniture, yourself, the clothes, and the pets. Notice no one else relies on even a fraction as many emoticons and colors and fancy fonts as you do. Myself, I prefer to concentrate on the ideas being discussed, and when I am reading your posts the colors and fonts make me feel like I am conversing with a clown with a bright red bulbous nose and huge pink floppy shoes and a gigantic painted-on smile. Just FYI.