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    8 days ago

    When a lightly salty body of water evaporates over time in the right way and on the right terrain, the result is a very flat layer of salt. But the surface isn’t anything like glass. It does occasionally rain there. It’s a kind of sticky slush of tiny moist rocks.

    Bonneville is large enough, thick enough, and flat enough to run extremely fast straight line machines on. Flat, like a geometric plane. There’s lots of things made of glass that are curved; glass is known for its smoothness.

    Salt flats are flat, and not necessarily smooth. Glass is smooth, and not necessarily flat.