“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.”
Conversation
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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Replying to
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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After paddling a 100 miles in a day he makes camp on a beach... only to meet wolves. Who howl and have whales sing back. This is unreal/dream-like stuff wtf
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The economics in this story are interesting. Grandpa George was a royal court musician. Freeman was bound to the military industrial complex. George lived a rewilded life outside of the cash economy for the most part. At least for this 1970s frontier chapter of his story.
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George makes plans to build a little cabin at glacier bay. Moonscape type territory. Ringed by mountains and inaccessible except for a few months in summer. He plans to have his climber friends bring food and stay. Inlet-keeper. This puts the hard in hard waldenponding.
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Chapter 20. Still in the 70s. Plans to build his house interrupted. Park service want to hire him and his baidarka for research. The canoe can go where other vessels can’t. George is basically Arctic Han Solo with a baidarka for a millennium falcon and no chewy.
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The idea of the house is now toast. George is now frontier guy setting up a summer camp in Torch Bay for the park service scientists along with guy named Ned Gillette. Cook, carpenter, etc. Book author enters the story as a character.
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Summer camp scientist stories with George as yoda-cook. “George likes cooking for people who work hard. When he cooks for people who just sit around, it hurts his own sense of worth. He explained this pointedly several times, and we took it as a warning.”
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‘“The cook has a lot of power, and I intend to use it,” George confided once to Ned and me. It was a funny line, or a disquieting one, I wasn’t sure which.’
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New chapter. George has pre-installed a beef with a new arrival at the camp, a small mammalogist the book calls Mouse Woman. Wonder who it was. If this were a romance novel they’d fall in love or something.
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George is a character out of Jack London. In this chapter he tries to make a crab trap (fail) and a spare paddle (success). Both projects use combos of natural material and tech material. The paddle is a spruce, plywood, and epoxy. Trap was a sapling plus beach-found junk netting
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Now “a wigwam... sweathouse... tepee of beachcomber plastic draped over a driftwood tripod.”
Something childlike about this but with adult competence. I used to do stuff like this in the yard as a kid.
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No-context George quote: “I’m on a different level...I’m building a different thing. I know it’s strange. But I’m an expert on this business of inner space and outer space, and how one is a manifestation of the other.”
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This book is slow going because I’m reading a paper copy like a barbarism and I can only read for a half hour or so on the balcony before I lose paper book stamina. Kindle ebooks so much better.
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Ok a horrible cruise director type character has arrived and killed the energy, so George who has been making mystical preparations to leave, is leaving with author. 2-person baidarka trip back south. On to chapter 27, back to Freeman.
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Short Chapter 27: Freeman dreams up a huuuge nuclear rocket concept to go to alpha Centauri. I guess with Orion canceled might as well wrap up on a speculative high note. Chapter 28: George plans a huuuge canoe. Brower isn’t subtle about his juxtapositions.
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“For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.” — Freeman Dyson
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3 deft chapters on Freeman. On starship concepts, anecdotes from an exobiology conference, and one on space colonies. Philosophical differences with neighbor Gerard O’Neil of O’Neill cylinder fame.
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