Saturday, August 17, 2013

the horses ass....important or not?

(not my work but it's a fun tale to share and it's not really serious)

This is Quite Interesting


source




Railroad tracks.
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 Scotland,
and Scottish expatriates designed the US railroads.

Why did the Scottish 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 had used for building wagons, which used that same
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 the old, long distance roads in Scotland 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 (including Scotland ) for their legions.
Those 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 this?', you may be right.

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

When you used to see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there were 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 was arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of two horses' asses.
And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important!
Ancient horses' asses control almost everything...
And current Horses' Asses in government
are controlling everything else.
AND HERE ENDETH THE LESSON!

Well I thought I t was interesting....

Friday, August 09, 2013

Another casualty in the war for the Constitution

Another casualty in the war for the Constitution...

I applaud you Lavabit.  Respect.

source

My Fellow Users,
I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on--the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.
What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.
This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.
Sincerely,
Ladar Levison
Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC
Defending the constitution is expensive! Help us by donating to the Lavabit Legal Defense Fund here.

Wednesday, August 07, 2013

We're living '1984' today

This editorial sums up the American Experience quite well, at least in this present day.  (And who thought I'd ever agree with CNN?)

We're living '1984' today


By Lewis Beale, Special to CNN
updated 9:22 AM EDT, Sat August 3, 2013
SOURCE:


Editor's note: Lewis Beale writes about culture and film for the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and other publications.
(CNN) -- It appears that the police now have a device that can read license plates and check if a car is unregistered, uninsured or stolen. We already know that the National Security Agency can dip into your Facebook page and Google searches. And it seems that almost every store we go into these days wants your home phone number and ZIP code as part of any transaction.
So when Edward Snowden -- now cooling his heels in Russia -- revealed the extent to which the NSA is spying on Americans, collecting data on phone calls we make, it's not as if we should have been surprised. We live in a world that George Orwell predicted in "1984." And that realization has caused sales of the 1949, dystopian novel to spike dramatically upward recently -- a 9,000% increase at one point on Amazon.com.
Comparisons between Orwell's novel about a tightly controlled totalitarian future ruled by the ubiquitous Big Brother and today are, in fact, quite apt. Here are a few of the most obvious ones.
Lewis Beale
Lewis Beale
Telescreens -- in the novel, nearly all public and private places have large TV screens that broadcast government propaganda, news and approved entertainment. But they are also two-way monitors that spy on citizens' private lives. Today websites like Facebook track our likes and dislikes, and governments and private individuals hack into our computers and find out what they want to know. Then there are the ever-present surveillance cameras that spy on the average person as they go about their daily routine.
The endless war -- In Orwell's book, there's a global war that has been going on seemingly forever, and as the book's hero, Winston Smith, realizes, the enemy keeps changing. One week we're at war with Eastasia and buddies with Eurasia. The next week, it's just the opposite. There seems little to distinguish the two adversaries, and they are used primarily to keep the populace of Oceania, where Smith lives, in a constant state of fear, thereby making dissent unthinkable -- or punishable. Today we have the so-called war on terror, with no end in sight, a generalized societal fear, suspension of certain civil liberties, and an ill-defined enemy who could be anywhere, and anything.
Doublethink -- Orwell's novel defines this as the act of accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct. It was exemplified by some of the key slogans used by the repressive government in the book: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. It has also been particularly useful to the activists who have been hard at work introducing legislation regulating abortion clinics. The claim is that these laws are only to protect women's health, but by forcing clinics to close because of stringent regulations, they are effectively shutting women off not only from abortion, but other health services.
 Snowden documents: U.S. spied on EU Bush vs. Obama on surveillance Police are tracking where you drive Brok: NSA's spying on EU 'out of control'
Newspeak -- the fictional, stripped down English language, used to limit free thought. OMG, RU serious? That's so FUBAR. LMAO.
Memory hole -- this is the machine used in the book to alter or disappear incriminating or embarrassing documents. Paper shredders had been invented, but were hardly used when Orwell wrote his book, and the concept of wiping out a hard drive was years in the future. But the memory hole foretold both technologies.
Anti-Sex League -- this was an organization set up to take the pleasure out of sex, and to make sure that it was a mechanical function used for procreation only. Organizations that promote abstinence-only sex education, or want to ban artificial birth control, are the modern versions of this.
So what's it all mean? In 1984, Winston Smith, after an intense round of "behavior modification" -- read: torture -- learns to love Big Brother, and the harsh world he was born into. Jump forward to today, and it seems we've willingly given up all sorts of freedoms, and much of our right to privacy. Fears of terrorism have a lot to do with this, but dizzying advances in technology, and the ubiquity of social media, play a big part.
There are those who say that if you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of. But the fact is, when a government agency can monitor everyone's phone calls, we have all become suspects. This is one of the most frightening aspects of our modern society. And even more frightening is the fact that we have gone so far down the road, there is probably no turning back. Unless you spend your life in a wilderness cabin, totally off the grid, there is simply no way the government won't have information about you stored away somewhere.
What this means, unfortunately, is that we are all Winston Smith. And Big Brother is the modern surveillance state.