> Fly by the seat of your pants (literally).
I believe this expression had been literal for thousands of years, and has
only become metaphorical over the last century.
While smell is only of passing use in horse riding, and taste normally
only by one party (for training reinforcement), sight, hearing, and touch
are very important on both sides. Of these, the last is perhaps more
important than people who have grown up in an industrial environment
realize: one gets a remarkably low-latency* picture of what the horse is
up to, how it is going now and how it is likely to react next, through
one's seat, and dually the horse can get a fair understanding of one's
wishes from the shifts of weight upon its back. Even to this day, one may
observe that someone who rides well "has a good seat".
-Dave
:: :: ::
* back when I did real-time network audio, one of the problems we ran into
was that minor jitter which would go unseen in video was definitely
audible -- and the haptic devices with which I now work are only effective
because they close their feedback loops at greater frequencies yet.
