Quotes About Engineering

There is a story about Henry Ford that dramatizes the "just enough" philosophy nicely: Ford used to send his people out to scour the scrap heaps of America looking for old Ford engines. Dragging them back to Detroit, they would look for the parts that hadn't worn out and then downgrade the specifications to save money.

For engineers, designers and other creative problem-solvers, a formal definition of the constraints within which they must work is essential to channel energies and expand creativity.

So a life builds up in layers, piecemeal, a kind of haphazard engineering that has elements of skill and cunning - the previous layers mostly hidden, as are the smaller mounds within, the clumps of different-coloured earth, the burnt offerings, the nodules of pain and the delight. The hard graft of the chopped-off antlers, picking and stabbing and scraping. The embers of old fires, old flames, in mute fragments of charcoal.

Ciro, who loved machinery and its design, thought the tanks were ugly. What beauty could be found in something that was created with the sole purpose of destruction?

If engineering cannot tell us what our houses should look like, nor in a pluralistic and non-deferential world can precedent or tradition, we must be free to pursue all stylistic options. We should acknowledge that the question of what is beautiful is both impossible to elucidate and shameful and even undemocratic to mention.

In all other construction disciplines, engineers plan a construction strategy that craftsmen execute. Engineers don't build bridges; ironworkers do. Only in software is the engineer tasked with actually building the product. Only in software is the ironworker tasked with determining how the product will be constructed. Only in software are these two tasks performed concurrently instead of sequentially. But companies that build software seem totally unaware of the anomaly.

Does anyone really believe that a pattern of exploitation old as our civilization can be halted legislatively, judicially, or through any means other than an absolute rejection of the mindset that engineers the exploitation in the first place, followed by actions based on that rejection? This means if we want to stop the destruction, we have to root out the mindset.

The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.

A story tells of Henry Ford's buying scrapped Ford cars and having his engineers disassemble them to see which parts failed and which were still in good shape. Engineers assumed this was done to find the weak parts and make them stronger. Nope. Ford explained that he wanted to find the parts that were still in good shape. The company could save money if they redesigned these parts to fail at the same time as the others.

People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.

Everybody hunches at workstations now. On the other hand, anybody with engineering chops is guaranteed promotion down below. Plus, such damned souls as we get now have to do data entry.

the soothing cadence of somebody reading always had a transformative effect on babies; Griffin's theory was that children were evolutionarily engineered to listen to stories, because it stopped them from wandering off into the woods and getting eaten by hairy mammoths.

Make no mistake, Concorde was an extraordinary technological achievement. Almost certainly, one of the greatest.

The public should know that the liability issues here have yet to be resolved, or even raised. If you're a farmer and you're growing a genetically engineering food crop, those genes are going to flow to the other farm.

Jobs are disappearing from every sector of the economy, from engineering to health care workers, forcing hundreds of thousands of families into unemployment and low-paying jobs.

Light bulbs are very, VERY complicated.

This is a global fight to get the right people in the right place and we're talking about people with PhDs in engineering, computer science, mathematics.

First of all, try to have the highest of ethics and to be open and truthful about things, not hiding. If you have to hide something for company reasons, at least explain what you're doing. Don't mislead people. Know in your heart that you are a good person with good goals because that will carry over to your own self-confidence and your belief in your engineering abilities. Always seek excellence: make your product better than the average person would.

What was it like to live amidst such machines, to be familiar with them, to have them shape one's earliest intuitions about machinery: how it works, what it does, how it compares to living creatures?

He signed the letter: George Washington Gale Ferris.

Ferris had created more than simply an engineering novelty. Like the inventors of the elevator, he had conjured an entirely new physical sensation.

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The wheel had consumed 28,416 pounds of bolts in its assembly;

I think it is more than chance. It also tells me that if we want to avoid going extinct, we have to realize we're already at war with an enemy that's master genetic engineering and is conducting trillions of experiments every second, figuring out new ways to kill us.