SunseekerNY

My point was "the power of a single action." I did not feel attacked in any way, shape or form. I felt attacked when I had red paint spewed onto my full-length fur coat afterwhich I wrote a feature article for Newsday, and got another new fur coat.

One hundred years from now we might be discussing high-speed submarines as our preferred form of recreational transportation - on Mars. (They haven't found water on Mars yet, I know.)

Do we outlaw hairsrpay next to SAVE the ozone?

The absurdities of life are only apparent when someone points them out.

Jennifer

SunseekerNY

The US standard railroad gauge (width between the two 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 the US railroads were built by English expatriates.

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. Okay!

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? The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots first formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were
made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses. Thus, we have
the answer to the original question. Now the extra-terrestrial twist to the story...

When we 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 might 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 had to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
So, the major 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 wonder why it's so hard to get ahead in this world?

IRONMAN

WELL SAID SUNSEEKER!

Iggy

You are right, we have no control over or our destiny, our lawmakers don't have that power either. God does.
You think this board has no influence?
If you don't think a small group of people have no influence just look at the STM Club and how they lobbied to get and enact laws on Florida's waterways.
This board provides knowlage and knowlage is power. That knowlage informs us of what's going on in the world and enables us to stand up for what we believe. Armed with this knowlage we can write our Congressman and Senators to voice our opinions. It's the American way. Our freedom of speech.
If all 4000 OSO members agreed on a subject and we all wrote our government representitives, you think they could really ignore us? If we all worked together there's no telling what we could achieve.

I'm sure I speak for everyone here that we are proud to have men like yourself fighting to protect our way of life.
I too have a NAVY family, my brother served two tours in Vietnam and my brother in-law served during Korea. My boss's son is currenly flying F-18's.
Thank you all.

I can't remember what state it was (Tennessee or Kentucky?), but I remember reading they were trying to pass a law that banned PWC's from their lakes and waterways. Burried deep in the wording of the bill someone found that it would actually ban all forms of motorboats and not just PWC's. It never passed, but can you imagine if it did?