Deltoid Pumpkin Seed

What Hacker News says

1. wrycoderJun 2022
   John McPhee wrote a fine book on the effort to commercialize lighter than air heavy transport: The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed.

   I was watching a BBC episode on Africa's geography and its lack of navigable rivers or good harbors, and how that has held back economic development. These airships came to mind as a cheap way to access that continent.

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2. frompdxAug 2021
   I'm always hopeful that airships will make a comeback. I would love to be able to travel from the United States to Europe on an airship, just like they did at the in the early 20th century. I can see a lot of advantage from a comfort perspective, even if it does take more time than a plane.

   If you are interested in the history of airship travel, and its rise and fall, I highly recommend The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed by John McPhee. It's a short book about an unlikely union of ex Navy airshipmen and evangelical Christians chasing the impossible dream of brining airship travel back in an era where the world had moved on from airship travel.

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3. twoWhlsGudAug 2021
   You're probably familiar with the AEREON 26 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEREON_26 But if you haven't read John McPhee's excellent book The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, I'd highly recommend doing so.
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4. frompdxJan 2021
   When I saw this thread "Business Adventures" was the first thing I thought of. I bought a copy when it appeared on one of Bill Gate's summer reading lists. It's a great book. The story of the Piggly Wiggly stock corner is great, as is the story of the creation of the Xerox machine. I think I lent my copy to a co-worker who I'm fairly certain never read it. They also never gave it back. Oh well.

   For anyone looking for a book in a similar vein I recommend "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" by John McPhee.

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5. bcbrownDec 2016
   Language in Thought and Action, S.I. Hayakawa

   How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler

   Gilgamesh

   Beowulf

   Snowcrash

   High Output Management, Andy Grove

   Hell's Angels by Hunter S Thompson

   Programming Pearls, Jon Bentley

   Walden, Thoreau

   Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson

   Letters from a Stoic, Seneca

   Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu

   Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein

   Tyranny of Words, Stuart Chase

   Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon

   Disrupted, Dan Lyons

   Big Data, Nathan Marz

   Practical OO Design in Ruby, Sandi Metz

   Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

   Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainier Maria Rilke

   Anatomy of a City, Kate Ascher

   Language and Thought by Chomsky

   Hero of a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell

   Language and Responsibility by Chomsky

   Magic, Science, Religion by Malinowski

   Meditiations by Marcus Aurelius

   Oranges by John McPhee

   The Dream of the Enlightement, Anthony Gottlieb

   Nonexistant Knight/Cloven Viscount, two novellas by Calvino Italo

   Deltoid Pumpkin Seed by John McPhee

   Infrastructure by Brian Haynes

   I'd recommend almost all of them, but especially the first two, and Autobiography of Red(poetry).

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6. jleaderMay 2014
   One of my favorites, which I read as a teenager in the 70s, was "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed", about a startup that tried to commercialize a hybrid airship/airfoil craft. It provided the first description I'd read of using a computer approximation to solve a real-world optimization problem (in this case, finding the shape that gave the best combination of volume for helium and aerodynamic lift with the least drag).
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