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#28
January 6th 10, 04:03 PM
posted to rec.radio.amateur.antenna
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Science update,particle wave duality
On Jan 2, 1:28*am, Lostgallifreyan wrote:
wrote innews 
Mike Kaliski wrote: "Lostgallifreyan" wrote in message 5... Richard Clark wrote in : As the original poster (I presume it was Art) is in the habit of quoting a German surveyor of the early 19th century; it should have been settled by the Reichoffice of land boundaries. These threads seem to be started in the vein of a breathless discovery of an announcement tucked away in a locked file cabinet in the janitor's closet in the third basement revealing plans for the "new" hyper-Hohenzollern horse carriage expressway bypass - as much as the original comment, responses and counter-responses are so distinctive by fulfilling that metaphor. That reminds me of another great bit of writing, on military standards, I found it online somewhere, it explained how the Roman roads were decided based on uquestrian travel, went on to show how the same standard measures persisted through centuries of rail travel and ended up explaining why it is that the scale of the solid rocket booster of the most advanced form of orbital transport known was exactly correlated with the width of a horse's ass.  Basically true. The ruts on Roman or older roads caused by wagons and carts meant that any cart not conforming to a standard wheel width would tip over or lose a wheel. Rail wagons were adapted from road carts and so the standard was maintained through the Victorian era. Modern machinery is still essentially set up to those standards to maintain compatibility with earlier equipment and so that older machinery can still be maintained. Bit like the DOS prompt still being available in Windows? Mike G0ULI "There is an urban legend that Julius Caesar specified a legal width for chariots at the width of standard gauge, causing road ruts at that width, so all later wagons had to have the same width or else risk having one set of wheels suddenly fall into one deep rut but not the other. In fact, the origins of the standard gauge considerably predate the Roman Empire, and may even predate the invention of the wheel. The width of prehistoric vehicles was determined by number of interacting factors which gave rise to a fairly standard vehicle width of a little under 2 metres (6.6 ft) These factors have changed little over the millenia, and are still reflected in today's motor vehicles." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_gauge I'll buy that it's a lot older, that's the thing about roots, they trace out further than any effort to cut them does. And given how much they cover, it seems unwise to consider them a limiting factor. Sure, if you want to fly, can't stay rooted, but even that little homily doesn't mean that Arthur Clarke wasn't right about the space elevator. We won't go far until webuild one. And what's the betting its tramlines will still be the width of a horse's ass or two?- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - Amazingly precisely wrong! |
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