I’m coming in to this fairly cold. I’ve read Turing’s Cathedral by George Dyson and met him briefly once at a conference. Freeman I only know of vaguely via the Dyson sphere and nuclear rocket concepts. Let’s see what we can learn of this pair. I assume Esther will cameo too.
Conversation
Am reading a 1978 library book with a punch card in it. Wonder when this was last checked out?
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Just stubbing this tonight. One chapter in. Will start reading properly later this week.
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We open with 2 chapters on trees. Physicist Dyson Sr, is speculating about growing huge trees on comets to make them habitable, Hippie Dyson Jr. is literally living up a tree in British Columbia. This is off to a promising start. I think Dyson trees were featured in Hyperion?
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Okay Jr. is basically a more rugged and honest Thoreau, up a tree instead of waldenponding. He’s got an intriguing thing going. He’s competing with squirrels for insulation. He traps and releases them. We’re in the early 70s.
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Couple of workmanlike chapters sketching out Sr’s life as a prodigy. Educated during WW2 under Hardy at Cambridge, wartime work on bombing logistics leaving him with a sense of being a mass murderer, then off to Cornell to study QED with Bethe and Feynman. Genius stuff done early
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Again that sense, as in the Astounding review, that in the 40s there were only about a dozen people doing anything significant. Everybody else was interchangeable parts. Amazing how often the same people show up in all the stories.
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Aside: I prefer Kindle. I like to read a bit every night in bed with light off and can’t do that comfortably with paper books. 🙁
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After a few chapters focused on George’s life in PNW and some fine evocative prose on the Inside Passage natives, we’re back in Chapter 15 with Sr. and the Orion project. Nuclear-powered rockets.
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“It is in the long run essential to the growth of any new and high civilization that small groups of men can escape from their neighbors and from their govts, to go live as they please in the wilderness....”
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“... A truly isolated, small, and creative society will never again be possible on this planet” — from Sr’s manifesto in 1958. Very Buckyfullerish. Brower is really laying it on thick re: yinyang between Freeman’s space poiesis and George’s pnw praxis.
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The Orion rocket idea finesses temperature limitations of metals by having the nuclear explosions kick it up very quickly. 80,000 kelvin for a millisecond. Chemical rockets are continuous 4000k thermal stress.
This is not a subtle device 😆
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A heavy lens-shaped aluminum pusher plate greased between 2Hz explosions to drive a vehicle via a pneumatic shock absorber.
“lurch’s but not unpleasant. Greased like a channel swimmer, Orion would frog-kick through the void.”
I sense a contrast to George’s canoes coming soon.
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“Orion in its enormous power could haul such excesses of freight that no cleverness was necessary in planning staterooms and storage”
There’s the buckyfullerish expansive abundance thinking. Strategery is for the delta-vee poors.
We kinda got there with wasting transistors.
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Strikes me that effective futures thinking is the opposite of nuanced. Inventing the future = generate a giant surplus to swamp out uncertainty. The details don’t need elaboration, just a bounding box of abundance to emerge in. Orion=nuclear cornucopia out of gravity wells.
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The account of PNW native art a few chapters ago had shades of that same theme, except in a natural setting. Giant surplus of seafood driving native art. Neal Stephenson riffs on the same thing early in Cryptonomicon. Wonder if he got it from this book.
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“For bigger ships, using existing stockpiles of weapons would have worked. Just put enough propellant around, and it didn’t matter that the charge was not shaped. That was characteristic of everything we did. It was always easier if you made the thing big enough.”
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Damn an actual formula in this book. No wonder it’s not well known. Every formula halves sales according to Hawking heuristic.
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The description of Freeman as a theoretical physicist with an eye for beauty but also a very good engineer with an intuition for the essential part of a messy practical problem suggests a very rare mind. Musk for example doesn’t have the physicist side afaict.
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There’s YouTube videos of the Project Orion tests. Fascinatingly weird. Frog kicking is right. A jellyfish doing frog kicks.
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Now at George’s main act. Now we learn of the Baidarka, the Aleutian wood/whalebone-and-skin kayak he reinvented with aluminum and fiberglass and wrote a book about which I might now have to read
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While we’re talking lost maritime crafts, here’s another book I’ve had sitting on my shelf for a while and might read, on the wave navigation methods of the south seas amzn.to/1oNVaqe
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Now we meet George’s shady ex drug-dealer friend. George is some mix of Walt Whitman, John Muir, and a cyberpunk high-tech/low-life guy at this point in the story, not the tech historian he became later.
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Surprise twist: book is now dissing profligate artistic excesses of the inner passage natives and praising the Aleuts, who were less artistic, but more accomplished seafarers.
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“The artistic dugout builders of the Inside passage hated to leave sight of land, and ventured over the horizon only when a harpooned whale towed them there, or when a storm blew them. The Aleut kayakers paddled over the horizon often, and on purpose”
#TeamAleut #booFancyDugouts
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Heh this is basically chemical rockets vs Orion. Though I don’t immediately see the rude abundance aspect of the Aleutian canoe. The radical lightness perhaps?
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The Aleuts apparently routinely visited Kamchatka in Asia. Our planet is weird.
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If my life depended on finding and killing seals in arctic conditions in one of these I would basically give up and die.
“When he had knotted his last drawstring, the hunter was truly embarked. Man and kayak became a watertight unit, a sea centaur.”
No thank you.
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“It’s hard to devise a definition for sea mammal that does not make the Aleut a specimen”
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“The forerunner of [non-Aleutian kayaks sold in stores] is not the sea lion but the beer can.”
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Damn I had no idea Russians basically enslaved Aleuts during Russian Alaska times, and led a raid against Tlingit in Inside Passage in 1799. 500 Aleut canoes attacking Sitka 😱
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Yay for practical George
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Damn, George is a total badass. I had no idea when I met him. The kayak stuff was mentioned as a footnote in a space discussion.
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He navigated the Yuculta rapids in his fiber glass baidarka over 3 days m.youtube.com/watch?v=hVlJTK
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On to Chapter 17: Oatmeal. Back to the Orion story.
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Okay that was a short chapter. TLDR: Orion killed. On to Part 2: Chapter 18. Back with George and Baidarkanomics.
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Now into George’s baidarka adventures. Not much to live tweet in this section. Just long, evocative passages about living lightly at interface of land, sea, and sky.
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Now he’s mate and navigator of a barge carrying a small farm up to Alaska in a haywire operation that reads like Huck Finn in the Arctic
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“One day a cow fell overboard. Carol Martin chaser it in the tug, twirling a lariat, full of happy memories of Colorado. He lassoes the cow from deck, and they hauled it aboard.”
HOW IS THIS NOT A MOVIE?
Shades of Oscar and Lucinda here
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The barge had a piano that George played 😂
This trip up to Juneau with a bunch of cows, horses, farm stuff, a truck... legend
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Now he’s done with the barge farm gig and is paddling from Juneau to Skagway. Google says ~7h in what looks like a ferry route. Alaska is huge.
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