[Healeys] friday funny: 2000 year old measurement...

[pieter scheenhouwer]

   Be sure to read the final paragraph, but your understanding of it  
will depend on the earlier part of the content. This is amazing and  
very funny. . . .


The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet,
8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.


Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in  
England , and English expatriates built the US railroads



Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines  
were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and  
that's the gauge they used.


Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the  
tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building  
wagons, which used that wheel spacing.


Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if  
they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on  
some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the  
spacing of the wheel ruts.


So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first  
long distance roads in Europe (and England ) for their legions. The  
roads have been used ever since.


And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts,  
which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon  
wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome , they were all  
alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States  
standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the  
original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.  
Bureaucracies live forever.


So the next time you are handed a Specification/ Procedure/ Process  
and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with it?' you may be exactly right.


Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate  
the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.) Now, the twist  
to the story:



When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two  
big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These  
are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at  
their factory in Utah The engineers who designed the SRBs would have  
preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by  
train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the  
factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs  
had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the  
railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as  
wide as two horses' behinds.



So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the  
world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two  
thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass.



And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's  
asses control almost everything...and CURRENT Horses Asses are  
controlling everything else!!