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....