I was thinking.....
As I was eating a burrito, all of the filling spilling out of the sides. Yes, I had cut it and was using a fork.
But, who determines how sharp a fork can be?
Who?
Somebody has to.
Somebody has to sit in a little cubicle somewhere far away from here and determine exactly how sharp your forks should be. Just enough to spear your food, but not sharp enough to be dangerous to the touch.
Huh.......
Then there is everything else in the whole world. There are standards and guidelines for everything....... Just imagine ----------
How wide roads are.
How thick walls are.
How thin cans are.
How tight lids snap.
How strong cardboard is.
How heavy cups are.
How long tires last.
The ratio of carbon to iron in your toaster.
The clarity of sound emanating from your television.
The brightness of said television.
Everything has measurements and figures that we know nothing about.
Everything has been thought out and engineered exactly to meet our needs.
That is......
Except for the sharpness of my fork!
Thursday, September 21, 2006
The clarity of sound.
Divinely contributed by Allister Reynolds at 5:17:00 PM
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1 comment:
So a long time ago, when my grandfather was really getting into sending internet fowards, I got this thing. I couldn't find the exact e-mail, so I googled it, but it's the same one that's been floating around forever. Kind of relevant, standardization of things, I guess.
Does the statement, "We've always done it that way" 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 U 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 war 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!
ps: comment!!
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