From: Frank Yung-Fong Tang (franktang@gmail.com)
Date: Wed May 18 2005 - 04:00:42 CDT
2005/5/17, Peter Kirk <peterkirk@qaya.org>:
>
> On 17/05/2005 14:56, Doug Ewell wrote:
>
> There
> is no point in designing a car to last 50 years when its design is
> likely to be obsolete in 10.
You surely have a bad car. What is the brand? You won't say that if you
drive Toyota or Honda.... Even the German Bettles still looks like what they
used to look in before WWII.... Fortunately you are not in the car making
industry....
Standard surely evolve. I believe many standard we used today, including
what we used in the automobile industry today, is build on top of standard
specified many years ago. If you do not agree, read the following story...
http://www.horsedoctor.homestead.com/breedinfo.html
" In the United States the standard railroad gauge (distance between the
rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number, so 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.
So the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches was
derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
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 ironic 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 SRB 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.
"
-- Frank Yung-Fong Tang 譚永鋒 Šýšţém Årçĥîţéçţ Day: 703-265-6347 http://people.netscape.com/ftang Skype: FrankYungFongTang Yahoo IM: FrankYungFongTan AIM ID: ytang0648 MSN IM: FrankYungFongTang@hotmail.com
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