But they’re resurfacing the road round the corner from my flat, with machines that go chuggachuggachuggachugga and beepbeepbeepbeepbeep and grundagrundagrundagrundagrunda.
I thought I’d left that behind when I moved from my last flat, which was basement level. Whoops.
Can someone hurry up and invent self-healing tarmac, please? Henry, can you have a look in your slushpile, just to be sure?
I sympathise – I had a few days worth of that at work recently. As well as self-healing tarmac, we also need self-cleaning buildings and parking lots to banish sand blasters and pressure washers for good.
Still, at least it’s quieter than when our local Starbucks blew up and we had days worth of police, news helicopters, and clean-up crews.
Henry, can you have a look in your slushpile, just to be sure?
Wrong person, mate. You’d need to ask the physical sciences editors.
However, the concept of self-healing tarmac was invented years and years ago by Daedalus, the wacky inventor who wrote for New Scientist and subsequently, Nature. Daedalus came up with an idea called ‘living road’, a kind of genetically engineered lichen that could be used to surface roads, and which lived on petrol spills and tyre fret. I can’t find a reference to this online but I’m pretty sure that it was published in the collection The Inventions of Daedalus.
When Daedalus
defectedmoved to Nature, a reader wrote to New Scientist asking where Daedalus had gone and was he well? The Editor of New Scientist (you know who you are, Mike) responded with a note to the effect that Daedalus was alive and well and “working for a totalitarian regime”, which caused a surreptitious smirk in the Nature office, I recall.My memory of an earlier (or later?) Daedalus self healing road was to have it made of a highly non-linear, shear-thickening material that would flow under low shear and be incredibly hard at high shear rates. Thus high speed traffic would trundle along and wrecks would be slowly absorbed.
I discovered the Fail blog today (OK, so erv pointed it out).
I mention this because it had a photo of the maritime version of what Brian described:
Oh, and this is not totally out of place here either:
Makes you want to commute in to work in the end, no? Get yourself some peace and quiet in the middle of London.
They weren’t too bad, finishing at about 1isham, as far as I could hear, just in time for me to hear a lovely lady vomit by my front door.
When I lived in Earl’s Court, on the junction of the A4 and the A3220 (which locals affectionately know as the West Cromwell Road and Warwick Road), the grinding machines and resurfacing machines would go on til about 5am, and were about as loud in our flat as talking or the radio. So it wasn’t so bad…
Even without the invention of self healing tarmac, alot of the drilling can be avoided if only the Telecommunications companies had better planning and better coordination; I often see the same road dugg up twice in a space of 12 months!