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Railroads

Does the statement, “We’ve always done it like that” ring any bells?

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 England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.

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?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The 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.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

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 army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.

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 at 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.

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!

Spam

Have you ever wondered why junk email is called “spam?”  This bit of nonsense from Monty Python’s Flying Circus is said to be the basis for the use of the term spamming to describe the sending of unsolicited junk email:

“Well there’s egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and spam; bacon and spam; egg, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam; spam, spam, spam, egg and spam; spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam; or lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle pate’, brandy and a fried egg on top of spam.”

Dr. John’s Machine

Back in the early days of computers, the programming was done by “hard-wiring”the computer to perform a certain sequence of instructions.  People spent hours determining the wiring scheme followed by more hours actually getting the wiring right…

Fortunately, a fellow named Dr. John Von Neumann came up with a better idea. He developed the concept of actually storing the program in the computer’s memory rather than spending all the time hard-wiring the damn thing.  Hence, the basis for today’s computer technology was born. As you should suspect by now, most computers (including your smartphones and tablets) are “Von Neumann” machines.  They run “stored programs” containing “machine language instructions” under control of something inside your device called a “program counter” that figures out what instruction to do next.

How does this work?  Well, the computer’s central processing unit (CPU) typically has an internal “clock” that “ticks” at some speed such as 2 Gigahertz per second.  During each clock tick or “cycle,” specific things happen inside the computer.  For example, during one clock cycle, an instruction may be fetched from memory and decoded.  During the next clock cycle, the instruction starts execution; during the next clock cycle, a piece of data may be retrieved from memory and added to another piece of data, and so on and so on.

Of course today’s computers are much more sophisticated than those of Von Neumann’s era… and a lot smaller and faster.  The machines Von Neumann worked with filled floors in buildings and took almost forever to do what your hand-held smartphones and tablets do in microseconds.  But, as sophisticated as today’s devices are, they still do what Dr. Von Neumann told them to do years ago.