oh yeah have i ever told yall of the academic war i have been an unwilling soilder in for the past two years
okay SO. i have two professors that both teach this one subject, but different classes. they have different last names, so i didnt know this at first and espically since they are academic RIVELS at my school, but they are MARRIED. but for the past 8 years they have been in an academic WAR of geospatical sciences data. more accurately, the raster vs vector data debate. i am personally on the side of “both have their pros and cons and can be utalizied to the utmost efficency” but both professors are like, DEADLOCKED in insistanting one is better then the other
so, professor A is my mentor. i like him a lot, and he was the main person that taught me the most abotu Eris and ArcGIS. professor B is a professor i had one for class, and shes nice and knows a lot of little tricks about Eris programming but mostly relies on arcMAP because shes the raster data professor.
and THESE MOTHERFUCKERS. have written no less then 30 papers that is basically like a “re: re: re: re: re: re: vector data is better then raster fuck you” but like, Professionally. and they leave stupid notes in the footnotes that read “Reguardless of Professor A’s opinions reguarding the efficency of Vector data, Raster data has a more efficant polygon computing rate and is the most commonly used program on interplantaring mapping” and its HILARIOUS
ive read all of their papers, and its basically like reading an email chain between a married couple arguing over the colors of the kitchen backsplash for their new home. its HILARIOUS. but obviously, because of their differnet last names and because they act like they HATE each other, NOT VERY MANY PEOPLE REALIZES THEYRE MARRIED
until like LAST WEEK
professor B publishes a paper that casually drops the word “husband”
and obviously all the students are like “oh i didnt know u were married!” because we read that shit like how white suburban mothers read People Magazine
and shes like “yeah, its Professor A”
and we all FLIPPED. THE FUCK. OUT
we thought the framed picture of the two of them on professor A’s desk was ironic because hes that type of guy
like, you gotta undestand. these two have gotten into YELLING matches in hallways. these two refuse to go onto trips with each other. but apparently they have a system where they quite LITERALLY leave all of their work at work and drive home in seperate cars and literally NEVER mention work at home. it is SO funny
this reminds me of the time I visited Canterbury Cathedral and a nice old volunteer told me all about the grooves worn in the floor from pilgrims kneeling there
Things like this don’t just reflect the past, they also shape the future.
When Rome was building its network of roads, it was also using war chariots with wheels a standard size and distance apart. The chariots wore deep grooves into the roads that were essentially the same everywhere. Because of these ruts, everyone pretty much always made wagons and other wheeled vehicles with wheels that fit into them so they didn’t have one wheel slip into one and crack the axle. This just sort of became The Size Vehicles Are, so train tracks have their rails match these dimensions too. A lot of train lines pass through tunnels, and these tunnels are of course built just large enough to accomodate the trains. These train lines, with the tunnels, are pretty much the only reasonable way to move very very large cargo overland.
When we build space ships, we didn’t build everything at the launch pad. Parts had to be constructed all over the place. These parts then had to be moved for assembly. That means that had to be put on trains. That means they had to fit in the tunnels, which were sized based on trains, which were sized based on their rails, which were sized based on the exact dimensions of war chariots of the Roman Empire.
And that’s how the grooves worn into roads by Roman soldiers two thousand years ago determined real physical properties of space craft.
This is a very beautiful story but it does not make it a true story
Railroads have had LOT of gauges:
The standard gage was close to historcal and a happy-enough medium that it became standard for “trivial and unremarkable reasons.” i.e: “The historical tendency to place the wheels of horse-drawn vehicles approximately 5 ft (1,524 mm) apart probably derives from the width needed to fit a carthorse in between the shafts“
