The Starship and the Canoe
From jacket: Freeman Dyson is an astrophysicist, one of America's most renowned and most imaginatively creative. His son George, with no degree to his name, lives by himself in a tree house in British Columbia. The elder Dyson looks to the stars for man's salvation; he wants to go there himself, in the vanguard of a great migration...The younger Dyson - as "earthbound" as his father is "star-crossed" - looks to the wilderness regions of our own planet and sees human destiny in the renewal of man's pretechnological resources.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
8mentions
7people
2010–2025years
75% recommend13% neutral13% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- [Data-Oriented Design – Richard Fabian]
DoD is an interesting design philosophy used in game engine design. This book was both quite concrete and quite abstract, so I walked away not exactly sure if I got the message, but the idea of modelling data closer to a SQL database for performance is interesting.
[Never Split the Difference – Chris Voss]
Nightly audiobook. There's a lot more information than it seems on first reading, I'm trying to internalize and practice it in daily life.
[Lost Connections – Johann Hari]
A book about depression, connection, and medication. It was quite good, though I learned later that the author has quite a bit of controversy.
[The Twentysomething Treatment – Meg Jay]
The book was good, her interviews on people's podcasts are even better.
[You Can't Win – Jack Black]
Awesome HN recommendation, an autobiography of an early 1900s criminal.
[The Starship and the Canoe – Kenneth Brower]
Another HN recommendation. A snapshot of the life of Freeman Dyson of project ORION and his son George, who built a giant fiberglass canoe and paddles the west coast of Canada and the States.
- I read The Starship and the Canoe after it was mentioned in a reply to me [1], what a great book.
The theoretical physicist father, Freeman Dyson, champion of Orion, pretty much said that the idea was crazy and he wouldn't have pursued it further by the 70s IIRC. Of course, other scientists' options may have differed.
- Have you read The Starship and The Canoe? Interesting book to goes into a good bit of detail about hunting craft (made from animal skin). Book said that they practiced 10 different was to turn a flipped one back over.
- I guess it's time to reread Starship and the Canoe - a great book about Freeman's nuclear weapon powered spaceship and his son George's interest in building boats. I thoroughly enjoyed it 25+ years ago.
- Watchmen (Alan Moore)
Origins of Form (Christopher Williams)
Starship & The Canoe (Kenneth Brower)
The Size of Lumber (Nicholson Baker)
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Shunryu Suzuki)
Deschooling Society (Ivan Illich)
Moby Dick (Herman Melville)
Bolo'Bolo (P.M.)
Le Ton beau de Marot (Douglas Hofstadter)
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (James Lovelock)
Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation (Umberto Eco)
Neuromancer (William Gibson)
The Intelligent Investor (Benjamin Graham)
Don Quixote (Miguel Cervantes)
- You're thinking of the inventor James Dyson. Freeman Dyson was a physicist. That's why the comment.
BTW, Starship and the Canoe is a very interesting book if you know Dyson.
