The Wisdom of Thom Yorke

Thom Yorke was interviewed by the New York Times, regarding his band Radiohead’s trailblazing decision to sell their newest album online for…well, for whatever you choose to pay, from zero to £99.99. Yorke showed that he knows more about traffic than many traffic engineers: when explaining why the band did this instead of signing a multi-million-dollar contract with a major record label, he said:

I mean, it’s tempting to have someone say to you, ‘You will never have to worry about money ever again,’ but no matter how much money someone gives you — what, you’re not going to spend it? You’re not going to find stupid ways to get rid of it? Of course you are. It’s like building roads and expecting there to be less traffic.

Not exactly true, but a lot closer to the truth than to say that building roads will get rid of traffic. It may actually be that Thom Yorke is something of a transportation geek, judging by the artwork from Radiohead’s 1997 album, OK Computer.

Blasting

Stockholm is built on rock. Really, it’s an ancient rocky sea-bed, back before the last ice age, when the Baltic Sea was much bigger. This means that for any construction project that needs to go into the ground, it will involve not just diggers and bulldozers, but also DYNAMITE! When I was here in 2004, the entire spring season was punctuated by blasting a block away from my university building, where the new Försvarshögskolan (Military College) building was being built, with a sudden “boom” in the distance at about 3pm or 6pm. Well, now that building is complete and there’s no more blasting…at least, not there.

Sure enough, there’s blasting again — each day at 2pm, 4pm, or 6pm. But this time, it isn’t a block away…it’s somewhere deep below us. Stockholm is building a ring road around the city center — the Norra Länken, and the parts they’re working on right now go underneath the tundra hill on which KTH sits. Once they’re done excavating, it’ll look something like the photo at left, which shows an earlier project: the Södra Länken, which is another tunneled segment of the ring road on the other side of town. (If you know Brian Lee, ask him about that — he toured it during the summer he was in Stockholm.) In any case, these blasts feel like they’re directly below, they’re lower-pitched, and they actually make the floors jiggle a bit. It’s like a 4.0 earthquake each time. Just something else to get used to, I suppose — good thing I’ve got that California earthquake training.