This almost explains all of the mysteries in life:
>
>
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 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.
>
>   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. 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.  Bureaucracies live forever.
>
>   So the next time you are handed a Specification/Procedure/ Process and wonder
> ‘What horse’s ass came up with that?’ . . . you may be exactly right.  Imperial
> Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of
> two war horses.  (Two horses’ asses.)  Now, the 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 at Utah.
> The engineers who designed the SRBs 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.  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?  Ancient horses’ asses
> control almost everything . . . and CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling
> everything else!!