Railroad gauges in the US are always 4'8½". Why? Because that was the gauge used in England, and the British built the railroads in the US. Why did the British use this gauge? Because the companies that built railroad cars were the same that built wagons and carriages, and they used the same equipment for both. 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. Why did the ancient roads use this measurement? 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. So why were the chariots 4'8½" wide? In order to accommodate the two horses that pulled them. Finally, when we 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, which are made by Thiokol at their factory at 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 from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So … it all goes to show that our most modern and advanced technology is still being governed by horses' behinds.
In South Africa, you could (and probably still can) buy maps/globes of the world with south on top & north on bottom, as well as clocks that run counterclockwise. Basically novelties, but they make you think about your preconceptions. There's also the myth that the vortex as a bathtub is drained rotates in the opposite direction in southern hemisphere compared to northern hemisphere.
