Month: November 2010

Paving the Daytona Speedway

They’re in the process of repaving the Daytona International Speedway.  It will take 6 months and 50,000 tons of asphalt to complete the job.  The most challenging part is keeping the paving machines on the 30–degree banked curves. They use bulldozers as a counterweight, and cables and winches to hold the paver on line.  The track hasn’t been repaved since 1978.

Daytona1

Caterpillar D9 supports Paver. Cat D8 supports Roller. Hamm DV-8 Double Steel Drum Roller compacts asphalt. ABG 525 fixed screen paver places asphalt. Triaxle Dump Truck hauls asphalt. Roadtec 1000 shuttle buggy transfers asphalt from truck to crane. Link Belt 60 ton hydraulic crane supports conveyor that feeds asphalt to paver.

Thanks Gene

The day there was no news

Newspaper“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

Those words were fashioned by Benjamin Franklin in a 1789 letter to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, a French physicist.  He was talking about the uncertainty faced by the United States, having just instituted its Constitution yet still in its nascent stages. 

But what if, for one day, nothing — other than death and taxes, that is — happened?  That is, what if there was a day where there was no news?

Preposterous, of course.  But on April 18, 1930 — Good Friday — BBC Radio reported exactly that.

The evening prior, the British government wanted to deny some news which had made the rounds, but because the newspapers weren’t printing due to the holiday, they went to the radio.  Within twenty-four hours, these untold issues were no longer news — and, apparently, BBC Radio determined that nothing else was, either.  For their 6:30 broadcast that evening, they simply announced “There is no news” — and filled the remainder of the time with piano music.

The rest of the story