Non-political things that make you say...WTF?!?! (Welcome To Florida!) **NOT CV RELATED** NO TALKY!

Belongs in either the WTF thread or the Thread of Awesome. Can't decide.





Gotta say, it's an abomination but at the same time I dig it.

 

Reminds me of a 1954 Corvette Nomad

 

Stolen:


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?
Well, because that's the way they built them in England, and English engineers designed the first US railroads. Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that's the gauge they used. So, 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 more often on some of the old, long distance roads in England . You see, 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 England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.
And what about the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match or run the risk 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 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.

 

I want to read it, but my Adult ADD just won't allow it.

 

It's worth reading.

 

That's good, if true. Wouldn't doubt it though. Humans are inherently lazy and tend to be routinely limited by that laziness.

 

Not breaking wagon wheels doesn't sound like laziness to me.

 

Very true, but they narrowed down their possibilities of new, fresh ideas by accepting the "standard" wheel base width just because it overcame one of the obstacles that obstructed their path to a goal.

Just saying, humans more than likely take the path of least resistance.

 

That's the definition of efficiency. Don't fix it if it ain't broke.

 

There were quite a few different track gauges in the US up until the Civil War, when they began to consolidate. Erie & Lackawanna was actually 6 feet, which would have been nice for those rocket booster engineers. The transcontinental railroad designers decided on 4 feet 8-1/2 inches and that was that.

 

Precisely my point, the death of innovation.

That's what normal people think. engineers on the other hand believe if its not broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.

 

Went to big box store that rhymes with Maples to send a 1lb 10oz package via UPS. The guy said it would cost me $20 something. I said to the guy, "WTF". He did not know how to read a scale, and insisted on entering 10lb as package weight. I had to argue and explain oz and lb to him.

 

The guy wouldn't grasp decimal places either.

 

Tbf state line road has been trash for decades

 

Should've described it as 1.1 Tacoma beds

 

Imagine how many people just paid what he said & never knew otherwise.

I had a kid at Homie Depot offer to cut a sheet of MDF to size for me. I told him the measurements, which included 3/8”, and watched as he marked at the 3/4” mark of his tape. I spent a few minutes explaining the hash marks on his tape measure but ultimately sent him on his way and took my sheet home to cut down. Kid had 0 clue how to understand fractions.

 

I have an engineering degree and I have to count the tick marks on the tape measure to figure out where I am. Imperial measurements make no sense.

 

I deal with surveys/surveyors. When I have to think about "tenths of a foot" I want to shoot myself.

 

LOL, I found a sheet of paper on the counter yesterday where my wife was attempting to do math on fractions. Pretty sure it didn't go well.