Useless (But Fun!) Fact For Today

[Emerikol]

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!

[wheelbender6]

Wow. Nice research.

[TominMO]

Genius. I therefore hesitate to offer my own puny contribution of the day:
Reno, NV is west of Los Angeles.

[cheesy]

I’m guessing the 44” rail gauge in South Africa is due to skinny asses.

I’ll grab my coat on the way out.

[Emerikol]

And another one:

During the great depression, a lot of farmers in the United States were unable to pay their mortgages and had their farms and homes foreclosed. Later, when the bank would try to sell off the farms at public auctions, the previous owner and their neighbors would show up, usually with the family rifles, but always with pitchforks and garden implements. The original owner would bid a ridiculously low amount of money for the property, and anybody that had stones big enough to bid against them got a resounding beating at the hands of the community. The original owner would walk away with their farm back, now completely paid for, and nothing lost but a few dollars for their trouble. They were called "Penny Auctions".

[Emerikol]

25 Oct 22:

Christopher Lloyd compared his part as Judge Doom in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" (1988) to his previous role as Klingon Commander Kruge in "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock" (1984), both being overly evil characters he considered "fun to play."
Lloyd figured that Doom was a toon when he read the introduction of his character in the script, and it was stated that Doom never blinks.
In one of the early versions of the script, Judge Doom was revealed to be the one who killed Bambi's mother.
Judge Doom originally had a vulture on his shoulder, and seven weasels accompanying him, rather like the Seven Dwarfs. He ended up only having five. He was also to have a jury of kangaroos, as in "Kangaroo Court." These elements were all dropped, because animating these extra characters would be too costly.
Tim Curry, Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, Jon Pertwee, John Lithgow, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Roddy McDowall, Dennis Hopper, and Christopher Walken were considered for, but declined, the role of Judge Doom. Robin Williams was considered for the roles of both Judge Doom and Eddie Valiant.

[2LZ]

Things that make you go "Hmmmm".
We saw Top Gun, Maverick on the flight to Florida. Good movie, really enjoyed it....then alarms started going off in my mind. Does anyone else see some of the similar story line in spots between TG-M and the first Star Wars movie?

[Emerikol]

Believe it or not, I haven't even seen the new Top Gun yet. I know, I know, I'm a terrible excuse for a pilot... Just haven't had the time to sit down and watch it.

[Bruces]

Originally Posted by Emerikol

Believe it or not, I haven't even seen the new Top Gun yet. I know, I know, I'm a terrible excuse for a pilot... Just haven't had the time to sit down and watch it.

That’s nothin ! Believe it or not ,I haven’t even seen Star Wars and I was in grade 8 when it came out .

[2LZ]

Originally Posted by Bruces

That’s nothin ! Believe it or not ,I haven’t even seen Star Wars and I was in grade 8 when it came out .

I saw it six times when it came out. It was my high school graduation summer when it debuted and was playing at a drive-in theater. It was the perfect date night!
"Hi Suzie. Wanna see Star Wars with me?" hee hee hee......

[cheesy]

Mrs.C and I played hooky from work to go see Star Wars. About the only time I've seen a theater packed during a matinee.

[TominMO]

Originally Posted by 2LZ

I saw it six times when it came out. It was my high school graduation summer when it debuted and was playing at a drive-in theater. It was the perfect date night!
"Hi Suzie. Wanna see Star Wars with me?" hee hee hee......

I would say this qualifies as a useless but fun fact.

[TominMO]

When the US and Canada went to war against each other. Copied from the Wikipedia page "Pig war".

The Pig War was a confrontation in 1859 between the United States and the United Kingdom over the British–U.S. border in the San Juan Islands, between Vancouver Island (present-day Canada) and the State of Washington. The Pig War, so called because it was triggered by the shooting of a pig, is also called the Pig Episode, the Pig and Potato War, the San Juan Boundary Dispute, and the Northwestern Boundary Dispute. Despite being referred to as a "war" there were no casualties on either side, aside from the pig.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_War_(1859)

[Emerikol]

28 Oct 22:

June 30, 1971. The Soviet retrieval team anxiously awaits the return of the Soyuz 11 cosmonauts in a remote region of Kazakhstan. A nearby recovery helicopter spots the scorched parachute of the spacecraft’s descent module as it plummets toward Earth. After making their way to the crashed module, the would-be rescuers open the hatch and reveal a gruesome discovery: the dead bodies of cosmonauts Georgi Dobrovolski, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev.

By all accounts, until that moment, the Soyuz 11 mission had gone perfectly. The team had spent more than 23 days in orbit, during which time they had occupied history’s first space station.

Their successful mission would stand as a triumphant rebuttal to the U.S. accomplishment of putting a human on the moon. The Soviets would regain the international fame they had not enjoyed since the historic launch of Sputnik (history’s first artificial satellite) on Oct. 4, 1957.

However, these hopes dissolved into infamy in 1971, as the Soyuz 11 cosmonauts and would-be heroes all returned to Earth dead.

The sudden and untimely deaths of these three cosmonauts quickly became the subject of intense debate. Tom Stafford, the chief of NASA’s astronaut corps, believed that the physiological stress of their long flight is what caused the cosmonauts’ demise. NASA physician Chuck Berry theorized that it was not a physiological cause, but that a toxic substance of some kind found its way into the descent module.

However, the United States would not learn the official cause of why the Soyuz 11 cosmonauts died until The Washington Post reported on the mission in October 1973.

Ultimately, the conclusion was that a ruptured breathing valve caused the men to die of decompression, which is the result of a sudden, large drop in air pressure, causing the air in your lungs to expand and tear the delicate tissue of the vital organs. Decompression also vaporizes the water in the soft tissues of your body, thus producing a certain amount of swelling. The continued leakage of gas and water vapor would lead to a dramatic cooling of the mouth and airways. The water and dissolved gas would create bubbles that impede blood flow.

After 60 seconds, blood circulation would come to a stop, your brain would be starved of oxygen, and you would fade into unconsciousness.

What the Soyuz 11 cosmonauts experienced in their final moments would not have been a painless end. The unexpected drop in pressure would have exposed them to the vacuum of space.

Although the official autopsies from the Burdenko Military Hospital remain classified, it is not difficult to surmise what symptoms they would have undergone. First, they would have felt an intense pain in their chest, abdomen, and head. Then their eardrums would have ruptured, and blood would have begun spilling out of their ears and mouths. During this, the men would have remained conscious for about 60 seconds.

With the men dead, Soyuz 11’s impeccable landing was completely automatic, as the capsule ran a programmed re-entry with no need for living pilots. Their deaths transpired 104 miles above the atmosphere, cementing their status as the only human beings to have ever died in space.

[Vlad87]

What's interesting with the pig war, is that it may look as a goofy curious incident only from our modern perspective. During 1859, when last american-british war was waged only about four decades before (1812-1815), and relations were very strained at best (remember the support Britain provided several years later to Confederacy), the perspective of another war between two giant nations was quite real and horrifying for both parties - that's why both sides ordered de-escalation actions as soon as news reached high cabinets.

Another curious thing, is that american federal army officer that was sent to prepare american defences in region during the pig war was future confederate major general George Pickett, participant of battle of Gettysburg