Gary,

Regarding the Space Shuttle, there's more to it than you may know... hidden
constrains from the prosaic. See below. The shuttle’s lavatory is a feat of
engineering too, why bother with that?

Regarding hydroplanes, I’ve been on hydroplane ferries that have luggage racks.
Some may carry a dingy with trolling motors to enjoy oneself when you get to
those exotic islands. Formula One cars probably have special coolant systems
and heat protection for the drivers.

The leading driver of High Technology is convenience. And convenience is often
driven by the simplest of human needs and motivations. Some of us might be
driven by theoretical perfection, but the objects in you metaphors are not.

Squeak removes many of the barriers between art, multimedia, science, research,
testing, business processes, information archiving/processing/presentation,
simulations, education, fun-and-games, and more. It’s at these edges, or
borders, where disruptive technologies are born.

In a world of C++ business tools, Visual Basic became an everyman’s programming
tool before it became a leading business tool.

Why can’t Squeak/Croquet become David Brin’s “shared galactic library”?
_____

"What's the relationship between the Space Shuttle And The Width Of A Horse's
Behind?

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 question.

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."

Cheers,
Darius :)