Add your useless facts here!!!

[annguyen1981]

January 8th was National Bubble Bath Day!

[annguyen1981]

No one??  Oh well.

[scratch]

Okay, it's not original...
http://gstwins.com/gsboard/index.php?topic=4571.msg36524#msg36524

[Caffeine]

Kamikaze pilots wore helmets.   

[scratch]

Oh, I got a real good one: I have a GS.

[Alphamazing]

Polar bears are left handed.

[roguegeek]

Bees are on the what now.

[onefastgs500]

did you know you can lead a gift horse to water but you can't look him in the mouth?

[GeeP]

The contact patch of a locomotive with 40" tires is significantly smaller than that of a GS500.  However, the axle loading is 330 times greater.   

[Alphamazing]

There is a town in Texas called "Ding Dong."
If you were born in Los Alamos, New Mexico during the Manhattan project (where they made the atomic bomb), your birth place is listed as a post office box in Albuquerque.
In the Catholic church, St. Gabriel, an archangel, is the patron saint of telecommunications.

And, just in case...
The international telephone dialing code for Antarctica is 672.

[makenzie71]

WAy back in the 50's or so when folks walked around with armor and swords and shaZam!, people used to roof their houses with thick straw mesh.  It kept the rain out and, since straw ferments as it ages and rots, it was rather warm.  In rainy weather the family critters would often climb up to the roof and burrow into the straw to stay warm and dry...but, when straw gets wet it gets really slick...so occasionally it rained cats and dogs.

Inside these houses there wasn't anything dividing the interior from the roof, and since this straw was a nice warm place all kinds of bugs and trash ended up in there.  Of course people's beds were inside and under these roofs so the folks wanted to protect their nice clean sheets from the scourge of the roof.  So they made large 4-post canopies to protect them.  My we think they're pretty today.

Also, these folks with straw roofs were usually poor and only the wealthier could afford stone flooring.  Walking into someone's house was sometimes the best way to tell if they were "dirt poor" or not.

These dirt poor folks had to deal with dirt floors all the time and, as most of you realize, dirt gets pretty cold in the winter.  So they utilyzed the same technology used on the roofs and layered thresh on their floors.  Having piles of anything inside a home can wreak havoc near any door, though...that's why we carry our brides over thresholds today.

These folks also didn't have a lot of food incoming, so almost everything they brought in went into the most economical variety of food that can be made...soup.  A huge kettle was usually set over the fire and it's contents were added to every day.  So you never really knew what you were eating or how long it'd been in the pot.  Hence the saying "peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old"...which befor learning all this crap I'd never heard.  Oh well.

Occasionally they did get a game animal down for some grub, though.  The majoraty of these animals was cut and shaved for drying into jerky.  A lot of times a favorite practice amongst folks and their guests was to grab a piece for everyone and sit around the table "chewing the fat".

There's a bunch of these...but I have yet to stumble across ANYTHING as interesting as how the average equestrian build had a major hand in how the Space Shuttle was desinged and built...which I had to copy this, can't recite it very well...

Say friend, did you know that the US Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8 1/2 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.

I see, but why did the English build them like that?

Because the first railway lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Well, why did they use that gauge in England?

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 their wagons use that odd wheel spacing?

Because, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagon wheels 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 Roman roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts?

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

Thus, we have the answer to the original question. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8 1/2 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot.

And the motto of the story is Specifications 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.

So, just what does this have to do with the exploration of space?

Well, there's an interesting extension of the story about railroad gauge and horses' behinds. 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 from 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 originally determined by the width of a horse's ass.

[annguyen1981]

Mak - That is some useless (but interesting) info!   

[that_guy]

hmmm, I like cheese.

[yamahonkawazuki]

The contact patch of a locomotive with 40" tires is significantly smaller than that of a GS500.  However, the axle loading is 330 times greater.   

ill be damned, i didnt know a locomotive had tires 

[GeeP]

The contact patch of a locomotive with 40" tires is significantly smaller than that of a GS500.  However, the axle loading is 330 times greater.   

ill be damned, i didnt know a locomotive had tires 

Yup!  It dates from the steam days.  Back then, locomotive wheels were made of cast iron.  Cast iron doesn't wear very well, so a "tire" of high-carbon steel was shrunk onto the outside of the wheel.  They would eventually wear out, and would have to be replaced.

Removing tires:  http://www.765.org/FWRHS_765_Tire_Removal.htm

Diesel locomotives and railroad cars are a little different, in part due to the very high temperatures they must endure.  These "wheelsets" are made up of three forgings, consisting of two wheels and an axle.  The wheels are shrunk onto the axle.  The forgings themselves are high-carbon steel.  When the wheel wears out new metal is sprayed onto the wear surface and the diameter restored by grinding.

"tire" still lives on as the standard way to refer to the contact surface of a wheel.  It's further perpetuated by the fact that Krupp, inventor of the three-piece wheelset in the 1800's, called the wheel a "tire".   

It wasn't the most uncommon thing for a heavy-handed express engineer to rune a heavy set on the independent brake when screeching into a station.  Sometimes, when the stops were close together, the friction was enough to heat the tire past it's critical temperature.  As the locomotive came to a stop the tires would literally fall off the wheels.   

[SV Devon]

September 19 is International Talk Like A Pirate Day!!

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/

[natedawg120]

what did you all do with your extra second last year?

[scratch]

Natedawg likes to ask off-topic questions in the middle of a thread.

[natedawg120]

nah there was an extra second at the end of last year.  Why, i have no clue.  That is a useless fact as any 

[oramac]

The harmonic series in music is the mathmatics behind the frequencies within a fundamental pitch.  The fundamental pitch you hear is actually built of a theoretically infinite number of pitches starting with an octave above the fundamental pitch, then a fifth above that, then a fourth above that, etc.  Harmonics are also what make in tune instruments sound 'in tune'

The harmonic series was first discovered and documented by pythagoras...the same guy that taught us the mathematical properties of the right triangle.