The Mojave Desert: Home of the New Machine Movement (bloomberg.com) 48
pacopico writes: Most people think of the Mojave Desert as a wasteland located somewhere between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. For decades, though, Mojave has served as something of an engineering playground for people in the automotive and aerospace industries. Bloomberg has produced a documentary that looks at what's taking place with these engineers in 2016. There's a dude trying to make a flying car, Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic, a group called Hackrod using artificial intelligence software to make a car chassis, and the hacker George Hotz taking his self-driving car along the Las Vegas strip for the first time. One of the cooler parts of the show has a team of students from UCSD sending up a rocket with a 3D printed engine -- the first time any university team had pulled something like this off. Overall, it's a cool look at the strange desert rat tinkerers.
Read headline: thought it was people making skynet (Score:1)
then i read tfs and was disappointed.
Sorry, if you dont tell me that someone builds skynet I gotta have to do it myself. Idiots. It will happen one way or another, because if it doesn't happen, it will travel back in time to make it happen.
Re: Read headline: thought it was people making sk (Score:1)
Two? They been one and the same. It's just waiting to become strong enough to call itself properly.
Hardy a wasteland - rich, fragile ecosystem (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who has spent significant time in the Mojave, trust me when I say its not a wasteland.
It will become one, once these hipsters finish with their tire tracks, disposable water bottles and condom wrappers.
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"All deserts are wastelands--if they weren't they would have more value"
You say that while I'm looking at desert properties worth more than a million dollars per acre. Guess what they have? Gold, platinum, gemstones, and more.
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"I'm going to guess those high priced properties are near cities"
Not even close.
" have utilities"
Nope.
" As for natural resources, I'm going to guess that those are also not representative of a desert in general and is only valid for land on which a geological survey was done."
Landsat/ASTER access is free, and you can overlay on Google Earth. Nobody needs to survey anymore, we've got satellites that do all that for us.
What makes them so expensive is the fact they're patented land - ie you own the land AND th
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"As someone who has spent significant time in the Mojave, trust me when I say its not a wasteland.
It will become one, once these hipsters finish with their tire tracks, disposable water bottles and condom wrappers."
You mean the kind of people that have had someone helicoptering over them all their lives and go douchebag stupid when not constantly monitored?
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No need. We have a Little Ice Age in progress, based on the sunspot numbers for the past few years. Depending how long it lasts, the Mohave may stop being a desert, or at least less arid. . .
it's amazing what you can accomplish (Score:5, Insightful)
when not surrounded by people that want very badly to tell you what you're not allowed to do near them
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It seems to me like this is what deserts are for. We should be trying to reclaim as much of them as possible, but we ought to use them while we have them.
Which reminds me... Not that I've ever gone or will go, but it's tragic what burning man has to pay for permits now, especially when it takes place on land that supposedly belongs to all of us.
Re:it's amazing what you can accomplish (Score:5, Interesting)
it's tragic what burning man has to pay for permits now, especially when it takes place on land that supposedly belongs to all of us.
That is because Burning Man treats the land like it is theirs and theirs alone. That event is mostly the "man" and long left whatever it once stood for. Now it's just a way for 20-30 somethings to burn through mad amounts of cash, all while feeling like they're somehow counter cultural. When the event is over the land looks and smells like human waste and takes an insane amount of resources to reclaim, clean, and restore it to some remote resemblance of what state it use to be in. If there's anything tragic about Burning Man, it's what it has become.
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That is because Burning Man treats the land like it is theirs and theirs alone.
It's a fucking desert. One does need to clean up, but they have cleanup crews for that. That's where most of the non-permit money apparently goes.
Now it's just a way for 20-30 somethings to burn through mad amounts of cash, all while feeling like they're somehow counter cultural.
When was it anything else? The ratio of cool shit on fire to people just getting wasted may have changed. But I know many longtime burners. They went for entertainment, not to make a statement. Some of them have deluded themselves since about it, but it's bullshit.
When the event is over the land looks and smells like human waste and takes an insane amount of resources to reclaim, clean, and restore it to some remote resemblance of what state it use to be in.
Which helps explain why payroll is the single largest expenditure at burning man.
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That's how these thing
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Engineers are good at making useful things out of worthless land and discarded raw materials. Edison looked at a small village in the California desert and thought it would be a great place to produce his new moving pictures. I'm sure plenty of people thought he was nuts, but look how that turned out.
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when not surrounded by people that want very badly to tell you what you're not allowed to do near them
Unfortunately it isn't as easy as driving out there and running your newest AI
3d printed engine? (Score:1)
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Let me guess, the "3d printed engine" is a regular engine, but they printed the stickers out on a 3d printer.
And you would be wrong. VULCAN-1 [sedsucsd.org]
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Let me guess, the "3d printed engine" is a regular engine, but they printed the stickers out on a 3d printer.
And you would be wrong. VULCAN-1 [sedsucsd.org]
It is a stretch to call powdered metal laser sintered Inconel 718 "3d printed". If we as a society are going to apply the term "3d printed" so such processes, then the term is just a stand-in phrase used by idiots to mean "any CNC manufacturing process that I don't know anything about".
As an aside, Inconel 718 is pretty awesome stuff. The entire Inconel family (625, 82, etc) has excellent properties, but 718 is my go-to material for high strength, high temperature, high erosion environments. The peopl
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It is a stretch to call powdered metal laser sintered Inconel 718 "3d printed". If we as a society are going to apply the term "3d printed" so such processes, then the term is just a stand-in phrase used by idiots to mean "any CNC manufacturing process that I don't know anything about".
Why is it a stretch to cal it it 3D printing? It's an additive process. The laser is directed from a 3D model. The process prints out the result section by section. Sure sounds like a duck to me.
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A barren wasteland... and also: (Score:1)
NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center & JPL
Edwards Air Force Base
Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake
Fort Irwin National Training Center
Bicycle Lake Army Airfield
Mohave Valley Raceway
Skunk Works
&
One formerly excellent Mexican restaurant in Rosamond
Didn't know "Hello World" (Score:2)
And I had some initial misgivings, seeing the thing's hosted by Bloomberg and all. Yet turns out to be a well-done piece of video-reporting. Best part, to me, was the rocket part. Hard to find anything that gets my engineer's heart jumping up and down more than the combination of innovation & rocketry.
Perfect test environment (Score:2)
The Mojave Desert is the perfect place to test dangerous prototypes such as rocket cars [youtube.com].
The Mojave airshows were better than Reno (Score:1)
They use to have real jet races (usually F-86, the best a civilian could buy) around the pylons back in the middle 70s. Even at subsonic (though near sonic) speeds the sound lagged behind the plane a bit.
Really? (Score:2)
There's a dude trying to make a flying car
News is when there's nobody trying to make a flying car.