Wow! Technolgies pace sure has picked up huh?

 

Total number of athletes who competed in the first Winter Ollmpic games in Chamonix in 1924 -- 258.

Number of athletes from the US alone competing in Salt Lake City -- 211.

 

The calander originally had 10 months. The Romans added two months to honor the Ceasars. July was added for Julius Ceaser, August was added for Augustus Ceaser. At least that's what they told us in Rome. Can anyone confirm?

Also, Rome was founded on the site where peasants found a wolf suckling abandoned twin babies, Romulus and Rameus. It's just a legend, but very popular in Rome.

 

Most people are still confused in thinking that the US Ice Hockey team defeated the Soviets for the gold medal in the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Games, when in fact, they defeated Finland for the gold medal. But because the Soviet defeat was so much more important, strategically and politically, that game got all the hype, and defeating Finland for the Gold in the subsequent games was a little less significant.

ok, not 'amazing', but just little olympic trivia for the season.

 

Did you know that I am in your closet right now?

 

What do the space shuttle and a horse's ass have in common?

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 the US railroads were built by English expatriates.

Why did the English people 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 use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts. So who built these old rutted roads?

The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts?

The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made by, or for, Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

Thus we have the answer to the original questions.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot. Specs 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 chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses.

When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might 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 to the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a horse's ass.

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by The Raptor
[B]It takes the earth exactly 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes and 45.51 seconds to complete one orbit of the sun.

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by jvils
[B]The calander originally had 10 months.

 

The symbol (+/-) on a battery does not necessarily mean positive and negative end. It just means that the (+) end point has a higher electric potential than the (-) end. So the (-) can also be a positive charge as long as it has a lower electric potential than the (+) end.

 

Velcro is just a name brand. The thing itself (those two strips of furry and rough pieces that hold things together) are really called "hook and loop" fasteners. If you ever look at a package of Velcro, you'll see it say, "Velcro brand hook and loop fasteners"