Additional thanks to RadioAstronomer for his exceedingly informative dissertation. Your discussion of the subject of the "parsec" brought back memories of my sophomore year in high school, when I was introduced to the parsec as a unit of astronomical measurement. I couldn't make sense of it at the time because (I thought) wouldn't it get smaller as the distance to the celestial target grew bigger? In other words, an object one parsec away would have to be at twice the distance of an object two parsecs away, right? Well, anyway, I got so frustrated with this concept in high school, and with my inability to articulate my quandry to the teacher in terms that he could understand, that it made me give up on astronomy completely, thinking that "any field that makes basic measurements with so crazy a unit of measure must not be science at all."
And to livius, and Elisha_Ben_Abuya, the original askers of the question: isn't FreeRepublic great!
(steely)
Thanks :-)
(psstt... I hated Parsecs too at first! Just don't tell anyone. :-))