Short answers, pulled from the story.
George Dyson, born on the 26th of March 1953, is an American non-fiction author and historian of technology. He is the son of physicist Freeman Dyson and mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, and the grandson of composer George Dyson. His books cover the history of computing, space exploration, kayak design, and the development of artificial intelligence.
Turing's Cathedral, published in 2012, focuses on John von Neumann and his 1946 effort to build a computer at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, known as the IAS machine. Despite its title, Alan Turing is not the book's central figure. It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times 2012 Book Prize in science and technology and was chosen by UC Berkeley for its On the Same Page program for 2013-14.
From 1972 to 1975, George Dyson lived in a treehouse built from salvaged materials at a height of 30 metres on the shore of Burrard Inlet. He spent twenty years in British Columbia in total, becoming a Canadian citizen, designing kayaks, researching historic voyages and native peoples, and exploring the Inside Passage.
The baidarka is an Aleutian kayak style developed historically and reshaped by Russian fur traders. George Dyson is credited with reviving the baidarka style of kayak. He wrote about its history in his 1986 book Baidarka and founded Dyson, Baidarka and Company, a designer of Aleut-style skin kayaks.
George Dyson's father is the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson and his mother is the mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson. His sister is technology analyst Esther Dyson, and his grandfather was the composer George Dyson. He and Ann Yow-Dyson have a daughter.
Darwin Among the Machines argues that the Internet is a living, sentient being. Dyson built this argument by expanding on a premise from Samuel Butler's 1863 article of the same name. The book examines the evolution of global intelligence in relation to technology.