Oh, Grow Up!

I had never heard of Enrico Fermi until I married The Mister; for those folks like me that suspect quantum theory is figuring out how to triple a recipe, he was a brilliant Italian physicist. Apparently folks in the hard sciences think he was quite a guy, and there are lots of questions he posed to hapless students such as myself, known as "Fermi Problems." One of the problems he asked was "How much does a fully loaded cement truck weigh?" That's an easy one, as long as you have a high speed internet connection. Depending on the number of axles, and the state law, the truck can weigh between 60,000 and 80,000 pounds. Take that, Mr. Fermi.

This question came up because of our after-lunch field trip yesterday to peruse the sod-laying at Highland Groves. As we drove along several curbs, I saw something like this:



And more along the corners:




And I wondered if the drivers that were blithely destroying the sod knew how much their trucks weighed, and how it wasn't a fair fight between a cement truck and new grass... I know that they presume it will get fixed - because it will - and why should they care because they don't live there anyway; but it still bothers me that they would be careless. But my irritation turned to outright anger when we drove by the park and saw this:



These tracks, of course, were made by a vehicle much lighter than a cement truck, and not just to cut a corner in a hurry; most of the contractors blame these types of incidents on "youth" out messing around, and generally they are perpetrated by a resident. What ever happened to the relatively harmless mischief of TP'ing houses or dumping trash cans? I remember when Higley Groves was being built, someone drove down the middle of park lane and took out about ten of the baby trees, and I felt very similar. Destruction of property isn't my idea of Saturday night fun; these folks were definitely "youthful" in their world view, no matter their physical age.

How about this for a Fermi problem: how many dollars of destruction does it take to move a youth to maturity?