Joyanna Adams

Nobody's Opinion

To Finally Go, Where Ray Bradbury Took Us…

Nobody Cares

Many Mar’s moons ago, I used to read a lot of Science Fiction..and Ray Bradbury was at the top of my reading list. Now I read mostly about politics, so you see things haven’t changed much.

As you may have heard, Ray Bradbury, the man who wrote so much great stuff, passed away, but not before he got to actually DRIVE the Mars Rover…something the he had inspired. Great spirits, and great imaginations, are products of the individual who dares to never grow old. His grandson said he never met a bigger kid.

Ray did not like the new direction of books on the internet though.  He had this to say:

Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell… A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

It will be a sad day when the “book” is outlawed…and no doubt by Bloomberg if he keeps going.  Nobody Thinks…Ray left a galaxy of wonderment for generations to come….

And that’s the mark of a true star.

June 8, 2012 Posted by | science | , , , | 1 Comment

Nobody Remembers the History of the Horse’s…Behind

Nobody Remembers

Here’s an email that tells you an interesting bit of fun in history and since it’s Friday,…and the “horses’ a$%- ” was just on TV…I thought it was too fun to pass up.

Enjoy! (Thanks to Tom Beebe)

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The U.S. Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s anexceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed the U.S. 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 jugs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that 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 on some 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 (including England) for their legions.

Those 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. 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. In other words, bureaucracies live forever.

So, the next time you are handed a specification, procedure, or 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.

Now, the twist to the story:

When you see (have seen) a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, you will notice that 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 larger, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from 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!

Now you know, horses’ass control almost everything..explains a lot of stuff doesn’t it?

And I haven’t even begun to talk about Washington D.C.

June 8, 2012 Posted by | History, humor | , , | 1 Comment