Tag Archives: desert

Desert Earthworks and Cosmic Connections

June 19, 2016 Mike

Some timepieces are intimate, think Breitling or Rolex or your trusty Timex [does anyone wear a watch anymore?] Some timepieces are monumental — prime examples might include Big Ben in London, the astronomical clock in Prague and Munich’s Rathaus-Glockenspiel,.

But then, there are time-keeping instruments on an altogether different scale — ones that dominate a significant portion of the landscape. And, where better to find one such example than the stark, high desert of New Mexico.

From the Guardian:

Somewhere in the deserts of New Mexico, a nail is embedded into a type of flat-topped mountain known as a mesa. The positioning of this nail, shielded from the elements by a tin can, took days of trial and error, with astronomical measurements provided by the US Naval Observatory and the help of a surveyor. Finally, the correct spot was located: exactly in alignment with the axis of the Earth from the south pole to the north.

This nail – which I braved rattlesnakes to find, on a mountaintop strewn with slabs of granite – was fundamental to the success of Star Axis, an extraordinary naked-eye observatory that is the brainchild of artist Charles Ross. Only when Ross was sure he had the orientation precisely correct could he begin to build the structure he had dreamed about – an obsession that has consumed him since 1971.

Star Axis is one of the world’s defining earthworks, otherwise known as land art. In the late 60s, a generation of young, New York-based artists, inspired by the space race but also by the turmoil of Vietnam, decided that galleries weren’t big enough to house their visions. So they struck out, choosing instead to make works on an epic scale, sculpted from the elements, in the astounding desert landscapes of the US south-west.

Read the entire story here.

Image: Star Axis. Courtesy: Star Axis / Charles Ross.

Art, Environs, Idea Soup

Can Burning Man Be Saved?

November 6, 2015 Mike

I thought it rather appropriate to revisit Burning Man one day after Guy Fawkes Day in the UK. I must say that Burning Man has grown into more of a corporate event compared with the cheesy pyrotechnic festivities in Britain on the 5th of November. So, even though Burners have a bigger, bolder, brasher event please remember-remember, we Brits had the original burning man — by 380 years.

The once-counter-cultural phenomenon known as Burning Man seems to be maturing into an executive-level tech-fest. Let’s face it, if I can read about the festival in the mainstream media it can’t be as revolutionary as it once set out to be. Though, the founders‘ desire to keep the festival radically inclusive means that organizers can’t turn away those who may end up razing Burning Man to the ground due to corporate excess. VCs and the tech elite from Silicon Valley now descend in their hoards, having firmly placed Burning Man on their app-party circuit. Until recently, Burners mingled relatively freely throughout the week-long temporary metropolis in the Nevada desert; now, the nouveau riche arrive on private jets and “camp” in exclusive wagon-circles of luxury RVs catered to by corporate chefs and personal costume designers. It certainly seems like some of Larry Harvey’s 10 Principles delineating Burning Man’s cultural ethos are on shaky ground. Oh well, capitalism ruins another great idea! But, go once before you die.

From NYT:

There are two disciplines in which Silicon Valley entrepreneurs excel above almost everyone else. The first is making exorbitant amounts of money. The second is pretending they don’t care about that money.

To understand this, let’s enter into evidence Exhibit A: the annual Burning Man festival in Black Rock City, Nev.

If you have never been to Burning Man, your perception is likely this: a white-hot desert filled with 50,000 stoned, half-naked hippies doing sun salutations while techno music thumps through the air.

A few years ago, this assumption would have been mostly correct. But now things are a little different. Over the last two years, Burning Man, which this year runs from Aug. 25 to Sept. 1, has been the annual getaway for a new crop of millionaire and billionaire technology moguls, many of whom are one-upping one another in a secret game of I-can-spend-more-money-than-you-can and, some say, ruining it for everyone else.

Some of the biggest names in technology have been making the pilgrimage to the desert for years, happily blending in unnoticed. These include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Google founders, and Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon. But now a new set of younger rich techies are heading east, including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, employees from Twitter, Zynga and Uber, and a slew of khaki-wearing venture capitalists.

Before I explain just how ridiculous the spending habits of these baby billionaires have become, let’s go over the rules of Burning Man: You bring your own place to sleep (often a tent), food to eat (often ramen noodles) and the strangest clothing possible for the week (often not much). There is no Internet or cell reception. While drugs are technically illegal, they are easier to find than candy on Halloween. And as for money, with the exception of coffee and ice, you cannot buy anything at the festival. Selling things to people is also a strict no-no. Instead, Burners (as they are called) simply give things away. What’s yours is mine. And that often means everything from a meal to saliva.

In recent years, the competition for who in the tech world could outdo who evolved from a need for more luxurious sleeping quarters. People went from spending the night in tents, to renting R.V.s, to building actual structures.

“We used to have R.V.s and precooked meals,” said a man who attends Burning Man with a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. (He asked not to be named so as not to jeopardize those relationships.) “Now, we have the craziest chefs in the world and people who build yurts for us that have beds and air-conditioning.” He added with a sense of amazement, “Yes, air-conditioning in the middle of the desert!”

His camp includes about 100 people from the Valley and Hollywood start-ups, as well as several venture capital firms. And while dues for most non-tech camps run about $300 a person, he said his camp’s fees this year were $25,000 a person. A few people, mostly female models flown in from New York, get to go free, but when all is told, the weekend accommodations will collectively cost the partygoers over $2 million.

This is drastically different from the way most people experience the event. When I attended Burning Man a few years ago, we slept in tents and a U-Haul moving van. We lived on cereal and beef jerky for a week. And while Burning Man was one of the best experiences of my life, using the public Porta-Potty toilets was certainly one of the most revolting experiences thus far. But that’s what makes Burning Man so great: at least you’re all experiencing those gross toilets together.

That is, until recently. Now the rich are spending thousands of dollars to get their own luxury restroom trailers, just like those used on movie sets.

“Anyone who has been going to Burning Man for the last five years is now seeing things on a level of expense or flash that didn’t exist before,” said Brian Doherty, author of the book “This Is Burning Man.” “It does have this feeling that, ‘Oh, look, the rich people have moved into my neighborhood.’ It’s gentrifying.”

For those with even more money to squander, there are camps that come with “Sherpas,” who are essentially paid help.

Tyler Hanson, who started going to Burning Man in 1995, decided a couple of years ago to try working as a paid Sherpa at one of these luxury camps. He described the experience this way: Lavish R.V.s are driven in and connected together to create a private forted area, ensuring that no outsiders can get in. The rich are flown in on private planes, then picked up at the Burning Man airport, driven to their camp and served like kings and queens for a week. (Their meals are prepared by teams of chefs, which can include sushi, lobster boils and steak tartare — yes, in the middle of 110-degree heat.)

“Your food, your drugs, your costumes are all handled for you, so all you have to do is show up,” Mr. Hanson said. “In the camp where I was working, there were about 30 Sherpas for 12 attendees.”

Mr. Hanson said he won’t be going back to Burning Man anytime soon. The Sherpas, the money, the blockaded camps and the tech elite were too much for him. “The tech start-ups now go to Burning Man and eat drugs in search of the next greatest app,” he said. “Burning Man is no longer a counterculture revolution. It’s now become a mirror of society.”

Strangely, the tech elite won’t disagree with Mr. Hanson about it being a reflection of society. This year at the premiere of the HBO show “Silicon Valley,” Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who was a founder of PayPal, complained that Mike Judge, the show’s creator, didn’t get the tech world because — wait for it — he had not attended the annual party in the desert.

“I really feel like Mike Judge has never been to Burning Man, which is Silicon Valley,” Mr. Musk said to a Re/Code reporter, while using a number of expletives to describe the festival. “If you haven’t been, you just don’t get it.”

Read the entire story here.

Image: Burning Man gallery. Courtesy of Burners.

BigBang

The Original Rolling Stones

September 9, 2014 Mike

Who or what has been moving these Death Valley boulders? Theories have persisted for quite some time: unknown inhabitants of the desert straddling California and Nevada; mischievous troglodytes from Middle Earth; aliens sending us cryptic, geologic messages; invisible demons; telepathic teenagers.

But now we know, and the mysterious forces at work are, unfortunately, rather mundane — the rocks are moved through a combination of rain, ice and wind. Oh well — time to focus on crop circles again!

From ars technica:

Mario is just a video game, and rocks don’t have legs. Both of these things are true. Yet, like the Mario ghosts that advance only when your back is turned, there are rocks that we know have been moving—even though no one has ever seen them do it.

The rocks in question occupy a spot called Racetrack Playa in Death Valley. Playas are desert mudflats that sometimes host shallow lakes when enough water is around. Racetrack Playa gets its name from long furrows extending from large rocks sitting on the playa bed—tracks that make it look as if the rocks had been dragged through the mud. The tracks of the various rocks run parallel to each other, sometimes suggesting that the rocks had made sharp turns in unison, like dehydrated synchronize swimmers.

Many potential explanations have been offered up (some going back to the 1940s) for this bizarre situation, as the rocks seem to only move occasionally and had never been caught in the act. One thing everyone could agree on was that it must occur when the playa is wet and the muddy bottom is slick. At first, suggestions revolved around especially strong winds. One geologist went as far as to bring out a propeller airplane to see how much wind it would take.

The other idea was that ice, which does occasionally form there, could be responsible. If the rocks were frozen into a sheet of ice, a little buoyancy might reduce the friction beneath them. And again, strong winds over the surface of the ice could drag the whole mess around, accounting for the synchronized nature of the tracks.

Over the years, a number of clever studies have attempted to test these possibilities. But to truly put the question to rest, the rocks were going to have to be observed while moving. A team led by Richard Norris and his engineer cousin James Norris set out to do just that. They set out 15 rocks with GPS loggers, a weather station, and some time-lapse cameras in 2011. Magnetic triggers were buried beneath the rocks so that the loggers would start recording when they began to move. And the Norrises waited.

They got what they were after last winter. A little rain and snow provided enough water to fill the lake to a depth of a few centimeters. At night, temperatures were low enough for ice to form. On a few sunny days, the rocks stirred.

By noon, the thin sheet of ice—just a few millimeters thick—would start breaking up. Light wind pushed the ice, and the water in the lake, to the northeast. The rocks, which weren’t frozen into the thin ice, went along for the ride. On one occasion, two rocks were recorded traveling 65 meters over 16 minutes, with a peak rate of 5 to 6 meters per minute.

These movements were detectable in the time-lapse images, but you might not actually notice it if you were standing there. The researchers note that the tracks carved in the mud aren’t immediately apparent due to the muddy water.

The total distances traveled by the instrumented rocks between November and February ranged from 15 to 225 meters. While all moving rocks travel in the direction of the prevailing wind, they didn’t all move together—motion depended on the way the ice broke up and the depth of the water around each rock.

While the proposed explanations weren’t far off, the thinness of the ice and the minimal wind speed that were needed were both surprises. There was no ice buoyancy lifting the rocks. They were just being pushed by loose sheets of thin ice that were themselves being pushed by wind and water.

In the end, there’s nothing extraordinary about the motion of these rocks, but the necessary conditions are rare enough that the results still shock us. Similar tracks have been found in a few playas elsewhere around the world, though, and ice-pushed rocks also leave marks in the shallows of Canada’s Great Slave Lake. There’s no need to worry about the rocks at Racetrack Playa coming to life and opening secretly ferocious jaws when you look away.

Read the entire story here.

Image: Rocks at Racetrack Playa, Death Valley. Courtesy of Arno Gourdol. Some Rights Reserved.

Art, Idea Soup

Burning Man Bucket List

September 4, 2014 Mike

As this year’s Burning Man comes to an end in the eerily beautiful Black Rock Desert in Nevada I am reminded that attending this life event should be on everyone’s bucket list, before they actually kick it.

That said, applying one or more of the Ten Principle’s that guide Burners, should be a year-round quest — not a once in a lifetime transient goal.

Art and Aliens Collide in Nevada

September 6, 2013 Mike

Not far from the alien conspiracy theories of Area 51, artists and revelers gather for the annual pilgrimage to burn the man in the Nevada desert. With attendees now numbering in the 50-80,000 range the annual, week-long Burning Man festival has become a mainstream media event.

It was originally a more humble affair — concocted by Larry Harvey and Jerry James as a bonfire ritual on the summer solstice or as they called it an act of “radical self-expression”. They held the first event in 1986 on a San Francisco beach, where they burned a wooden effigy of a man and his dog. The event has since grown and moved to the Nevada desert; the Burning Man moniker has stuck ever since and the (radical) self-expression lives on.

For more images from this year’s event jump here or visit Burning Man online.

Image: Burning Man 2013, art installation. Courtesy of the Guardian.

Arts and Letters

Kolmanskop, Namibian Ghost Town

June 21, 2013 Mike

Ghost towns have a peculiar fascination. They hold the story of a once glorious past and show us how the future took a very different and unexpected turn. Many ghost towns were abandoned by their residents as the economic fortunes of the local area took a turn for the worst — some from exhausted natural resources such as over-exploited mines, others from re-routed transportation, natural disaster or changes in demographics. One such town to have suffered from the inevitable boom and bust cycle of mining — in this case diamonds — is Kolmanskop in Namibia. The town is now being swallowed whole by the ever-shifting sands of the nearby Namib desert, which makes the eerie landscape a photographer’s paradise.

From Atlas Obscura:

People flocked to what became known as Kolmanskop, Namibia, after the discovery of diamonds in the area in 1908. As people arrived with high hopes, houses and other key buildings were built. The new town, which was German-influenced, saw the construction of ballrooms, casinos, theaters, ice factories, and hospitals, as well as the first X-ray station in the southern hemisphere.

Prior to World War I, over 2000 pounds of diamonds were sifted from the sands of the Namib desert. During the war, however, the price of diamonds dropped considerably. On top of this, larger diamonds were later found south of Kolmanskop, in Oranjemund. People picked up and chased after the precious stones. By 1956, the town was completely abandoned.

Today, the eerie ghost town is a popular tourist destination. Guided tours take visitors around the town and through the houses which, today, are filled only with sand.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Kolmanskop. Courtesy of Damien du Toit (coda). See more images from the flickr-stream here.