Skip to content
By using Twitter’s services you agree to our Cookies Use. We and our partners operate globally and use cookies, including for analytics, personalisation, and ads.
  • Home Home Home, current page.
  • About

Saved searches

  • Remove
  • In this conversation
    Verified accountProtected Tweets @
Suggested users
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Language: English
    • Bahasa Indonesia
    • Bahasa Melayu
    • Català
    • Čeština
    • Dansk
    • Deutsch
    • English UK
    • Español
    • Filipino
    • Français
    • Hrvatski
    • Italiano
    • Magyar
    • Nederlands
    • Norsk
    • Polski
    • Português
    • Română
    • Slovenčina
    • Suomi
    • Svenska
    • Tiếng Việt
    • Türkçe
    • Ελληνικά
    • Български език
    • Русский
    • Српски
    • Українська мова
    • עִבְרִית
    • العربية
    • فارسی
    • मराठी
    • हिन्दी
    • বাংলা
    • ગુજરાતી
    • தமிழ்
    • ಕನ್ನಡ
    • ภาษาไทย
    • 한국어
    • 日本語
    • 简体中文
    • 繁體中文
  • Have an account? Log in
    Have an account?
    · Forgot password?

    New to Twitter?
    Sign up
vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

Tweets

  • © 2020 Twitter
  • About
  • Help Center
  • Terms
  • Privacy policy
  • Imprint
  • Cookies
  • Ads info
Dismiss
Previous
Next

Go to a person's profile

Saved searches

  • Remove
  • In this conversation
    Verified accountProtected Tweets @
Suggested users
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @
  • Verified accountProtected Tweets @

Promote this Tweet

Block

  • Tweet with a location

    You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

    Your lists

    Create a new list


    Under 100 characters, optional

    Privacy

    Copy link to Tweet

    Embed this Tweet

    Embed this Video

    Add this Tweet to your website by copying the code below. Learn more

    Add this video to your website by copying the code below. Learn more

    Hmm, there was a problem reaching the server.

    By embedding Twitter content in your website or app, you are agreeing to the Twitter Developer Agreement and Developer Policy.

    Preview

    Why you're seeing this ad

    Log in to Twitter

    · Forgot password?
    Don't have an account? Sign up »

    Sign up for Twitter

    Not on Twitter? Sign up, tune into the things you care about, and get updates as they happen.

    Sign up
    Have an account? Log in »

    Two-way (sending and receiving) short codes:

    Country Code For customers of
    United States 40404 (any)
    Canada 21212 (any)
    United Kingdom 86444 Vodafone, Orange, 3, O2
    Brazil 40404 Nextel, TIM
    Haiti 40404 Digicel, Voila
    Ireland 51210 Vodafone, O2
    India 53000 Bharti Airtel, Videocon, Reliance
    Indonesia 89887 AXIS, 3, Telkomsel, Indosat, XL Axiata
    Italy 4880804 Wind
    3424486444 Vodafone
    » See SMS short codes for other countries

    Confirmation

     

    Welcome home!

    This timeline is where you’ll spend most of your time, getting instant updates about what matters to you.

    Tweets not working for you?

    Hover over the profile pic and click the Following button to unfollow any account.

    Say a lot with a little

    When you see a Tweet you love, tap the heart — it lets the person who wrote it know you shared the love.

    Spread the word

    The fastest way to share someone else’s Tweet with your followers is with a Retweet. Tap the icon to send it instantly.

    Join the conversation

    Add your thoughts about any Tweet with a Reply. Find a topic you’re passionate about, and jump right in.

    Learn the latest

    Get instant insight into what people are talking about now.

    Get more of what you love

    Follow more accounts to get instant updates about topics you care about.

    Find what's happening

    See the latest conversations about any topic instantly.

    Never miss a Moment

    Catch up instantly on the best stories happening as they unfold.

    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 24
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      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?

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
      Show this thread
    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 24
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      The Aleuts apparently routinely visited Kamchatka in Asia. Our planet is weird.pic.twitter.com/o0futNBFwd

      1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
      Show this thread
    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 24
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      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.pic.twitter.com/FXTolSeKuE

      1 reply 0 retweets 12 likes
      Show this thread
    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 24
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      “It’s hard to devise a definition for sea mammal that does not make the Aleut a specimen”

      1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
      Show this thread
    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 24
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      “The forerunner of [non-Aleutian kayaks sold in stores] is not the sea lion but the beer can.”

      1 reply 1 retweet 5 likes
      Show this thread
    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 24
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      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 😱pic.twitter.com/lN7bI0p3bs

      1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
      Show this thread
    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 24
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      Yay for practical Georgepic.twitter.com/FfZy1P9hy8

      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
      Show this thread
    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 24
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      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.

      1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
      Show this thread
    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 24
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      He navigated the Yuculta rapids in his fiber glass baidarka over 3 dayshttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hVlJTKTW6rQ …

      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
      Show this thread
    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 24
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      On to Chapter 17: Oatmeal. Back to the Orion story.

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
      Show this thread
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 24
      • Report Tweet
      • Report NetzDG Violation

      Okay that was a short chapter. TLDR: Orion killed. On to Part 2: Chapter 18. Back with George and Baidarkanomics.

      4:04 PM - 24 Mar 2020
      • 2 Likes
      • Liz Benbrooks Pete Taylor
      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 25
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
          Show this thread
        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 25
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
          Show this thread
        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 25
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          “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

          1 reply 1 retweet 4 likes
          Show this thread
        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 25
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          The barge had a piano that George played 😂 This trip up to Juneau with a bunch of cows, horses, farm stuff, a truck... legend

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
          Show this thread
        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 25
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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.pic.twitter.com/emQZJ43rpH

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
          Show this thread
        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 25
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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

          1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes
          Show this thread
        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 25
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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.

          1 reply 1 retweet 5 likes
          Show this thread
        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 27
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
          Show this thread
        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 27
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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.

          1 reply 1 retweet 7 likes
          Show this thread
        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 27
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
          Show this thread
        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 27
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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.”

          1 reply 1 retweet 5 likes
          Show this thread
        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 27
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          ‘“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.’

          1 reply 1 retweet 5 likes
          Show this thread
        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 28
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
          Show this thread
        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 28
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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

          2 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
          Show this thread
        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 28
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
          Show this thread
        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 28
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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.”

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
          Show this thread
        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 28
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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.

          2 replies 0 retweets 3 likes
          Show this thread
        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 28
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
          Show this thread
        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 29
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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.

          1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
          Show this thread
        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 29
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          “For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.” — Freeman Dyson

          1 reply 1 retweet 5 likes
          Show this thread
        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 29
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder …

          1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
          Show this thread
        23. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 29
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          O’Neill got famous for dreaming up large, comfy, expensive middle class space colony concepts. Iirc the thing in Neuromancer is an O’Neill cylinder? Freeman wants scrappy shoestring budget tin-can colonies modeled on the Mayflower economically. Pilgrims. Planters and adventurers.

          2 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
          Show this thread
        24. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 31
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          George and Ken are heading south in the baidarka. Arctic huck finn type voyage.

          1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
          Show this thread
        25. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Mar 31
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          That was a long languorous chapter on the voyage. Now some commentary. Brower declares both father and son romantic reactionaries but votes for the nostalgia of the son over that of the father. Freeman’s techno-utopian linear evolutionary visions of Freeman are judged misguided.

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
          Show this thread
        26. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 1
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Chapter on George and Ken recovering from exhaustion of 20h of rowing in Tyee, an abandoned cannery town. Both have fevers (coronavirus? 🤔). Hunter graffiti to which George adds: Didn’t hunt, Didn’t kill, Came here And sat still — Dyson, 1974 Heh I was born in 1974

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
          Show this thread
        27. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 1
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          George on pea soup made from a mix: “It’s amazing the stuff they pass off as food. It’s barely enough to let you survive. Just enough to let you sit in front of a TV set.” He’s suspicious of writers though he became one himself later. In this bit he and Ken aren’t getting along.

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
          Show this thread
        28. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 1
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Chapter 37. How to reduce cost of space exploration by 3 factors of 10: fewer people, more risk-taking types willing to die, better tech. 10^3=1000. I think Elon is shooting for ~100

          1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
          Show this thread
        29. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 1
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Freeman thought one space strategy was to simply wait a century after government programs quit and get junk for cheap, like Mayflower was a cheap private voyage more than a century after Columbus expensive state-sponsored exploration. With space it’s taken ~50 post Apollo.

          2 replies 1 retweet 6 likes
          Show this thread
        30. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 1
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          George and Ken are scouring a junkyard for an aluminum pole and plate to make a rudder. It’s a year after their big voyage (which Ken quit in Ketchikan). The book really likes to lay it on thick re these father/son juxtapositions.

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
          Show this thread
        31. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 1
          • Report Tweet
          • Report NetzDG Violation

          Now in a chapter on George’s enormous 48-foot 6-person canoe, Mount Fairweather. Built 1974-75. Dude’s a total Quixote. Apparently a legend in boatbuilding circles. I’d like to see it.http://westcoastpaddler.com/community/threads/george-dyson-re-launch-of-the-mount-fairweather-baidarka.6449/ …

          1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
          Show this thread
        32. Show replies

      Loading seems to be taking a while.

      Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.

        Promoted Tweet

        false

        • © 2020 Twitter
        • About
        • Help Center
        • Terms
        • Privacy policy
        • Imprint
        • Cookies
        • Ads info