Mexifornia or Adventures from the Technology Underground

Mexifornia: A State of Becoming

Author: Victor David Hanson

This book is part history, part political analysis and part memoir. It is an intensely personal book about what has changed in California over the last quarter century.

The Los Angeles Times

Hanson's primary worry is steadily rising illegal immigration into a welfare state with expanding entitlements and waning commitment to the history and virtues of Western civilization, an admittedly imperfect, coercive consensus that nonetheless held together a uniquely successful, multiethnic nation. The emerging Mexifornia is becoming "not quite Mexico and not quite America either." — Frederick R. Lynch

Table of Contents:

	Preface
	Introduction	1
1	What Is So Different about Mexican Immigration?	19
2	The Universe of the Illegal Alien	35
3	The Mind of the Host	60
4	The Old Simplicity That Worked	75
5	The New Gods That Failed	103
6	The Remedy of Popular Culture?	126
	Epilogue: Forks in the Road	142

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Adventures from the Technology Underground: Catapults, Pulsejets, Rail Guns, Flamethrowers, Tesla Coils, Air Cannons, and the Garage Warriors Who Love Them

Author: William Gurstell

The technology underground is a thriving, humming, and often literally scintillating subculture of amateur inventors and scientific envelope-pushers who dream up, design, and build machines that whoosh, rumble, fly—and occasionally hurl pumpkins across enormous distances. In the process they astonish us with what is possible when human imagination and ingenuity meet nature’s forces and materials. William Gurstelle spent two years exploring the most fascinating outposts of this world of wonders: meeting and talking to the men and women who care far more for the laws of physics than they do for mundane matters like government regulations and their own personal safety.

Adventures from the Technology Underground is Gurstelle’s lively and weirdly compelling report of his travels. In these pages we meet Frank Kosdon and others who draw the scrutiny of the FAA, ATF, and other federal agencies in their pursuit of high-power amateur rocketry, which they demonstrate to impressive—and sometimes explosive—effect at the annual LDRS gathering held in various remote and unpopulated areas (a necessary consideration since that acronym stands for Large Dangerous Rocket Ships). Here also are the underground technologists who turn up at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada high desert, including Lucy Hosking, “the engineer from Hell” and the creator of Satan’s Calliope, aka the World’s Loudest Thing, a pipe organ made from jet engines. Also at Burning Man is Austin “Dr. MegaVolt” Richard, who braves the arcing, sputtering, six-digit voltages of a giant Tesla coil in his protective metal suit. Add in a trip to see medieval-stylecatapults, air cannons, and supersized slingshots in action at the World Championship Punkin Chunkin competition in Sussex County, Delaware, and forays to the postapocalyptic enclaves of the flamethrower builders and the future-noir pits of the fighting robots, and you have proof positive that the age of invention is still going strong.

In the world of science and engineering, despite its buttoned-down image, there’s plenty of fun, humor, and sheer wonder to be found at the fringes. Adventures from the Technology Underground takes you there.

• Launch homemade high-power rockets.

• Catapult pumpkins the better part of a mile.

• Watch robot gladiators saw, flip, and pound one another into high-tech junk heaps.

• Dazzle the eye with electrical discharges measured in the hundreds of thousands of volts.

• Play with flamethrowers, potato guns, and other decidedly unsafe toys . . .

If this is your idea of fun, you’ll have a major good time on this wild ride through today’s Technology Underground.

From the Burning Man festival in Nevada’s high desert to the latest gathering of Large Dangerous Rocket Ship builders to Delaware’s annual Punkin Chunkin competition (a celebration of “science, radical self-expression, and beer”), you’ll meet the inspired, government-unregulated, and corporately unfettered men and women who operate at the furthest fringes of science, engineering, and wild-eyed arc welding, building the catapults, ultra-high-voltage electrical devices, incendiary artworks, fighting robots, and other machines that demonstrate what’s possible when physics meets human ingenuity.

Library Journal

Like most underground cultures today, amateur engineering has hit the mainstream through television shows, such as the technology-tinkering Junkyard Wars, BattleBots, and Monster Garage. Engineer and technology consultant Gurstelle (Backyard Ballistics) continues the trend by taking readers into the hidden communities of people involved in developing hurling machines (catapults and trebuchets), pulse jet engines, flamethrowers, tesla coil-powered electric current theater, air cannons, robots, high-powered rockets, and magnetic linear accelerator guns. Drawing on two years of experience mingling with people in these communities, Gurstelle balances scientific explanations of the technologies with profiles of the people who built them and descriptions of the events at which they were showcased. Given the amateur nature of developers' projects, examples of things that routinely go wrong are omnipresent throughout the text. Though very far from a how-to guide, this contains enough inspiration to get readers searching the Internet for detailed building specifications and then easily into trouble. Strongly recommended for adult public library collections.-James A. Buczynski, Seneca Coll. of Applied Arts & Tech., Toronto Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.