The Mojave Desert: Home of the New Machine Movement (bloomberg.com)

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.

Comments

Hardy a wasteland - rich, fragile ecosystem

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

it's amazing what you can accomplish

[v1]

when not surrounded by people that want very badly to tell you what you're not allowed to do near them

Re:it's amazing what you can accomplish

[slack_justyb]

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.

Re:it's amazing what you can accomplish

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:3d printed engine?

[OzPeter]

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.