[FRIAM] The Starship and the Canoe

[Barry MacKichan]

I read “The Starship and the Canoe” quite a long time ago, and I 
read a book (Baidarka) by George Dyson shortly after we moved to Seattle 
in 1988.

I met him many years later. The director of the Institute for Advanced 
Study was visiting Seattle, and there was a get-together at Charles 
Simonyi’s in Seattle. My wife and I were invited because I had been a 
member at IAS twice. Simonyi was one of my interviewers when I 
interviewed for Microsoft, and after he left Microsoft he was (is?) the 
chairman of the board of directors at the IAS because he had given them 
boatloads of money. Anyway, George Dyson was there and we chatted for 
about 15 minutes. At the time he was working on von Neumann’s 
collected works — I don’t if anything was published from that 
effort.

Another note. The second time I was at the Institute our oldest daughter 
was in high school and complained it just wasn’t fair to have to 
compete with one of Freeman Dyson’s daughters in her classes at 
Princeton High.

— Barry

On 7 Aug 2022, at 14:52, Jochen Fromm wrote:

> One reason why I like the FRIAM group: you stumble accidentally on a 
> book that looks interesting but in the FRIAM group at least one person 
> knows the author or has met him in Berkeley. Fascinating :)-J.
> -------- Original message --------From: Merle Lefkoff 
> <merlelefkoff at gmail.com> Date: 8/7/22  8:56 AM  (GMT-08:00) To: The 
> Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> 
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The Starship and the Canoe One of my favorite 
> books, Jochen.  It was written by Kenneth Brower, David Brower's son. 
> For those of you in a different generation, David was one of the 
> founders of the environmental movement in the 70's and founded many 
> organizations, including Friends of the Earth.  However, he made one 
> fatal mistake in his career.  He had the authority to help make the 
> decision to trade Glen Canyon for Dinosaur National Park (never 
> having visited Glen Canyon).  I knew David well, and he never got 
> over what he had done.On Sun, Aug 7, 2022 at 9:16 AM Jochen Fromm 
> <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:In a small shop in Tofino on Vancouver 
> Island I spotted a nice book named "The Starship and the Canoe" about 
> George Dyson and his father. Apparently George lived for a long time 
> in a tree house in British Columbia while his father was thinking 
> about building atomic rockets that could reach Mars. Interesting 
> book.-J.-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- 
> -.. .
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