Nomadic Research Labs "Art without engineering is dreaming;

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Nomadic Research Labs "Art without engineering is dreaming;

Postby crustyasp46 » Tue Jul 24, 2012 1:59 pm

This is the playground of Steven Roberts, N4RVE, who skipped out of midwest suburbia in 1983 aboard a "computerized recumbent bicycle" and never looked back. Linked from this page are adventure tales, philosophical maunderings, bloggage, system designs, technical resources, and how-to material covering a huge range of topics

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Steven Roberts
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(17,000 miles around the US, 1983 to 1991)
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(amphibian pedal/solar/sail micro-trimaran, 1992-2002)
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(with location tracking and solar power, 2003-2006)
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(open-ended global voyaging, 2011 and beyond,
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Articles are here.

The one article that touched me the most:

The Greatest Risk

© 1988 by Steven K. Roberts
Nomadic Research Labs

(An excerpt from Computing Across America, 1988)


Everyone has at one time or another shrunk from a growth opportunity because with it comes the Unknown. The Unknown! What’s out there, anyway?

Disappointment? Derision? Danger? Defeat? Death?

Those are all bad, certainly, but none of them are nearly as bad as nothing. None of those things can possibly be worse than the horror of Complacency that creeps like a psychic tapeworm into the mind, demanding a steady diet of the bland to let it propagate and infect those nearby. It’s insidious, evil, and epidemic in America. It slithers out of TV sets; it crawls from the pages of popular media. It hides in classrooms and slips unnoticed into vulnerable young brains.

And it does all this while masquerading brilliantly as knowledge and truth. Complacency is the adulterant of passion, the assassin of curiosity, the lobotomizer of life itself.

A friend’s mother once listened to me talking excitedly about my upcoming journey and shook her head in protective maternal fright. She summed it all up without even realizing it: “But honey, there are things out there... there are things out there we don’t even know about!”

Right on.

It’s possible to have growth without risk, but it is growth of the slow, vegetable kind, rarely yielding those magical breakthroughs that make you light up with understanding. It doesn’t take anything quite so radical as an epic bicycle trip to do this, of course, only the courage to risk the Unknown. Any kind of Unknown -- be it intellectual, geographical, cultural, scientific, physical... whatever.

Because the greatest risk of all is taking no risk. That’s the one that can really get ya, the death worse than fate.

So. Curious about something? Restless? Hungry for knowledge or change? Got a dream?

Go for it.

http://microship.com/articles/

Source : http://microship.com/

Have to admire this man's vision and following of his dream.
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