Word: asphalt
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...days," says Nardelli, who went to college on a football scholarship and had to start training in August. "I only had two months to work. You had to have jobs that paid well." His solution? "I worked road construction. One year we laid concrete highways. Next summer I worked asphalt." Nardelli's road-crew summers toughened the soles of his feet and taught him a lesson he would never forget: take the most difficult work and work harder at it than anyone else...
...Petraeus - whose Princeton thesis was entitled "The American military and the Lessons of Vietnam" -opted early on in the occupation to spend every cent of his discretionary budget on community projects around Mosul. Minutes into TIME's interview this week, he can scarcely wait to report that the defunct asphalt factory in Mosul which he reopened last year is now producing 200 tons a day. "There are trees falling in the forest and no one is hearing them," he says. "Of course we all do hear what blows up in Baghdad...
Noise can be controlled to an extent, depending on the source. Some of the biggest sources of ambient noise are highways and roads, but the cause is less honking horns or gunning engines--though those play a role--than tires hitting pavement. Pliable rubber making contact with asphalt doesn't seem as if it would produce a lot of noise but in fact it does, and in a lot of ways. As any spot on the tire strikes the highway, it hits with the thunk of a little rubber hammer. Also, the patch of tire that's in contact with...
...Bernhard, co-director of Purdue University's Institute for Safe, Quiet and Durable Highways, is to change not the tires but the road surface. "You can make the pavement porous," he says, "which affects the air-pumping mechanism. You can also mix a little rubber in with the asphalt, which changes the road's stiffness." Porous surfaces are already being rolled out in parts of Georgia, Florida and Arizona, as well as in Europe...
...walk seems instead to be a side-effect of our late-20th-century upbringing. We come, many of us, from a sidewalk-less, SUV-saturated suburbia that is famously inhospitable to walkers. Acquiring our cars was a rite of passage; our high schools were flanked by expanses of asphalt. Most of our walking was done at saunter, as we described long, lazy circuits of the mall. In my hometown, walking seems a dangerous eccentricity; when, at home over winter break, I walked to the end of Main Street, a high-school classmate I hadn’t seen in years...