Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Brittle fracture: It's not just for Liberty ships any more

We had a nice, freezing rain today, so when I got off the Metro to drive home, I found the Mazda covered in ice. The whole way home, it made creaking, sanpping noises, as you hear in any movie when the ice is about to give way and tumble down in chaos, or when the liquid metal robot is walking through liquid nitrogen, just before being shot by a future governor of California. So I was just waiting for that sharp bump that would cause the car to crack in two, like a Liberty ship at her fitting out pier. Happily, it didn't come to that; I arrived home safely, another beneficiary of the miracle of modern materials science.

2 comments:

Old Father William said...

Didn't it ever get cold growing up in OK? Why didn't you just run the car for a few minutes until the ice melted?

travis said...

The main reason I didn't do anything to remove the ice was that it didn't really matter. It just made scary sounds. But since running the car for the 25-minute drive home didn't seem to melt off the ice, I doubt that a few minutes in the parking lot would have made a difference.