Live data from Hacker News

Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert

bbc.co.uk

351–360 of 515 posts

Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert

#351
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to love the internet sometimes. Someone who works construction (as he stated) can develop a fun investigatory hobby just via the internet. The he can sign his work with a silly name like bear__f##ker (which I'm guessing is a reference to the movie super troopers).

On the other hand, it was people like this that once fingered the wrong person for the Boston Marathon bombing. It's all well and good as long as we remember not to put too much stock in it when it really matters.

> it was people like this that once fingered the wrong person

And it's people like you who try to judge them equivalent in public view, when they clearly aren't.

Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert

#352

This reminds me of other "land art" installations around the country. Presumably, these are done with the landowners permission: The Lightning Field: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lightning_Field Spiral Jetty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Jetty Negative Space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Negative_(artwork) Amarillo Ramp: https://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/amarillo-ramp

Not quite art but related: Mojave Phone Booth: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/mojave-phone-booth

Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the news reporter drill into it? How would they know?

Probably they hit it with a rock and decided it didn't sound hollow. They may also have noted an absence of seams. Seams could be hidden with welding and grinding, but that would suggest it wasn't assembled on site.

"Probably". I wouldn't trust journalists on this sort of thing. It would be completely insane to make this solid. It's almost certainly welded sheets with ground welds, assembled off-site.

Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert

#354
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably everyone is a criminal, because no one knows what all of the laws are.

That's the point. The government can compel you as they please under threat of harsh criminal punishment. For example, did you know it's illegal to lie to an FBI agent? Think of how many things could easily be misconstrued as lies in a normal conversation. Introduce yourself to an FBI field agent as a "Jim" when your given name is actually "James"? You've just committed a crime punishable by up to a year in prison.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001

It has to be "knowingly and willfully", "in any matter within the jurisdiction" of the government. While this is much broader than most people might realize or expect, it probably doesn't extend to using a nickname in a conversation when the agent hasn't asked you your legal name as part of an investigation!

(But the breadth of this kind of rule is definitely a reason that people are discouraged from consenting to an interview with law enforcement without a lawyer present.)

Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert

#355
post #296

(deleting, because now my comment is getting pasted all over the Internet, and though it was not to my knowledge misleading, it didn't actually provide any useful information)

> And the sister of the brother who died there is asking for people to please not go there and for the link to be deleted (from the group; I'm not sure they realize how viral it went).

That seems a very strange request given that it is public land. If it were private property that would be different, but this location is owned by the public.

Also, if it’s a memorial, it seems he might want people to visit it. Isn’t that the point of a memorial? To remember something?

Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert

#356
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't know that this thing existed like 2 hours ago and now you want to change the laws in our national parks to allow art installations across our parks? Why even have national parks and try to preserve wilderness? Maybe we can set up a Starbucks next to it and some bathrooms too. It's the famous monolith! Come one come all! > The purpose of the law is to improve the quality of life. I don't see how litter in m…

Simply put, I think it is cool and would like to to stick around. For what it is worth, here are a few points to consider. There already is art Throughout the wilderness and I think it is great. Sometimes the art is as simple as a statue or plaque commemorating a historic location, other times it is DIY art like this. The point of national parks isn’t to preserve wilderness for the sake of preservation. The point is…

Well you can certainly have your own perspective, I just disagree 100% with it and will use whatever means I have to make sure that the tiny bits of nature we have left are preserved to the extent possible. Some aluminum "art" in the middle of nowhere is a perversion and should be garbage collected. That's my view, which I will use dollars and my vote toward.

Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert

#358
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large scale castings are also tricky. You can't cast a rectangular prism and get good results. As the metal freezes (solidifies), it shrinks. You'd end up with a very poor surface finish at best, and chunks missing at worst. The shrinkage needs to be made up for with some additional molten metal. The fix is pretty simple though. You need directional solidification, meaning the freezing starts on one end and moved tow…

Just a note about aluminum recycling. Humans tend to trash things instead of recycling. Out here in the desert where people dump things I have noticed old steel cans rusted to nothing mixed with aluminum cans which seem to not degrade over time. Arguably if you are worried about the environment and account for human laziness steel cans are better for the environment IMO

I've read around 75% of the aluminum ever produced is still in use today. If you machine a new surface on aluminum, it will form an aluminum oxide layer in a matter of hours. I believe (but am not certain) this effectively prevents it from degrading the way steel does over time.

Aluminum can recycling rates tend to be higher in states that offer deposit programs. Back when they were getting introduced in the 80's, $0.05/container had a lot more buying power than it does today. It's enough of an annoyance now, they'd be best off eliminating it or increasing it to ~$0.15 or so. Or since this is HackerNews, maybe we could use block chain technology to verify each can is properly recycled and reimburse with bitcoin.

Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! I once reduced a 10,000 line module in a Broadcom 802.11 driver to one page - a template to construct a message. Calls to the old code (5-6 lines) went to nothing - simply pass your structure to the message API. But that was an eggregious driver. Previous version: ~15 modules. Rewritten by some purist: 900(!) modules. I kid you not.

Please tell me more! How come the calls to the old code went to nothing? It does not surprise me but I wonder how it happened in this specific instance. Who did the 900 modules rewrite?

Instead of declaring a message and creating it with a call to the (now obsolete) module specific to the structure being transmitted, one simply passed the structure to the message-send api. The conversion template to 'Message' automatically rewrote the structure argument as a message argument.

I was re-writing the driver as a simple C++ set of pure virtual objects and implementations for my hardware. So when I scavenged code to send a certain structure as a message, I simply didn't make the old calls. I remember I did (for some reason) edit all the old modules to use the new API, to prove it still worked I guess. A long afternoon of search and replace.

The (Korean?) company that owned the driver must have had a team or something. It was extremely brain-dead code for every element of an 802.11/ethernet abstraction as a separate module, done twice (once for the driver; once for the module firmware). Double structure definitions for everything.

My team wanted a walk-thru of the existing driver. I scheduled two hours, one before lunch and one after. I opened with "I've brought just the 500 most significant modules today, and we're going to walk thru a connection and message send". Proceeded to open dozens of nested module references on a very long path from triggering a connection attempt to exchanging the first message for negotiation. The hour was up.

Nobody came to the 2nd hour after lunch.

Re: Metal monolith found by helicopter crew in Utah desert

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For just that weight of metal...not too expensive. To get it formed into that shape, potentially very expensive. It looks like aluminum. Someone posted 23.5" x 23.5" x ~144" as the dimensions. This comes out to be 46 cubic feet, and would weigh about 7,700 lbs. A floor of the price would be ~40 cents/lb scrap price, or ~$3,100. Ballpark 80-120 cents/lb might be a more realistic price if it were straightforward to man…

Sand cast and polished...

As I noted in another response, you can't cast a rectangular prism and expect a good result. You'd need to add some angle to the edges to ensure it solidifies correctly, but doing so takes away from the monolith feel.

That's also a lot of polishing for the finish you would get from sand casting.

Post reply on HN