[Slide Presentation by George Dyson, 25 January 2003, 7pm
Bordentown, NJ] Admission is $5 includes refreshments.

ABSTRACT

Baidarka: the Skin Boat as a Frame of Mind

The oldest known continuously-inhabited sites in North America are in
the Aleutian Islands, where people have lived for as many as 10,000
years. The unusual success of the Aleut kayak, or baidarka, is still
incompletely understood. Dyson will discuss the evolution of the
baidarka, raising some of the questions evidenced by its design, and
surveying his own experiments at building similar vessels over the past
thirty years.

BIO

George Dyson is an author, designer, and historian of technology whose
interests have ranged from the history and prehistory of the Aleut
kayak (Baidarka, 1986) to the evolution of digital computing and
telecommunications (Darwin Among the Machines, 1997) and, most
recently, nuclear bomb-propelled space exploration (Project Orion,
2002). His early life and work, contrasted with that of his father,
physicist Freeman Dyson, was the subject of Kenneth Brower’s The
Starship and the Canoe, published in 1978.

Dyson, who grew up in Princeton, avoided formal education, and, during
the 1970s spent three winters in a treehouse 95 feet up in a Douglas
fir on the coast of British Columbia. His designs have been built by
thousands of followers and his books have been well received. James
Michener praised Baidarka as “a grand, detailed book that will be a
standard for years to come,” Oliver Sacks wrote that Darwin Among the
Machines was “a very deep and important book, beautifully written... as
remarkable an intellectual history as any I have read,” and Arthur C.
Clarke describes Project Orion as “one of the most awesome ‘might have
beens’ (and may yet be’s!) of the Space Age... essential reading for
engineers/scientists involved with government bureaucracies and the
notorious Military Industrial Complex... also vice versa.”

Dyson, who normally resides in Bellingham, Washington, is currently
Director’s Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ
for 2002-2003. He considers himself a follower of Nathaniel Bishop,
who, while stopping in Princeton in late October of 1874 (on a kayak
voyage to the Gulf of Mexico from Quebec) urged his audience to “seek
in his friendly canoe that relief which nature offers to the tired
brain.” According to Dyson, there is still no better advice than
Bishop’s: “let him go into the wilderness and live close to his Creator
by studying his works.”

For more information please call or email 609-324-8200