Advanced technology is thought to be futuristic, yet much of it is based on the past. That is because specifications seem to last forever. They affect the past, the present, and the future. Let us consider the following example which someone recently sent to me. The U.S. standard railroad gauge (that is, the distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. This equals 1.4351 meters, which also equals 3.1389 cubits. That's a very odd specification. Why was that rail gauge used? Because that's the way the engineers originally built them in England, and the U.S. railroads were built by English immigrants.
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