Monthly Archives: November 2022

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.

Andrew KissingerScience Humor

First rule of maintaining a healthy marriage while parenting an infant is nothing that’s said between 1:00am and 5:00am can be held against you.

Always nice to see my son’s apple return home from it’s daily school outing.

Everyone has their strengths. Mine is picking the grocery store checkout line filled with people who apparently have never gone through a grocery store checkout line before in their life.

My family needs therapy after a very traumatic 2nd grade math assignment.

My 8 year old brought a whistle home for his 6 year old sister so he’s grounded in a room with her until college.

“Oh, I do like Chinese food!” -My 6yo, eating chicken fingers & fries from The Imperial Bamboo kid’s menu.

if a take out meal feeds me at least three times i consider it groceries.

Parenting is a delicate balancing act where you need to teach your kids numbers but not well enough that they’re able to tell the time when you send them to bed early

I told my mom I thought parenting got easier as the kids get older and she laughed so hard she cried a little.

You have 2 post-graduate degrees, she reassured herself, losing another argument to her kid over how to spell Thursday.

did you know you can just buy bags of halloween candy with no intentions of giving any to trick or treaters? all the candy. all for you. totally legal.

My save for later cart on Amazon is up to about $1.3 million dollars.