Quotes About Tinkering

Bell invented the telephone while tinkering with acoustic telegraphy; Edison invented the phonograph while tinkering with the telephone.

Allison began broadcasting the countdown. Richard Feynman, a future Nobel laureate who had entered physics as an adolescent via radio tinkering, tinkered the radio to life. Men began moving into position. "We were told to lie down on the sand," Teller protests, "turn our faces away from the blast, and bury our heads in our arms. No one complied. We were determined to look the beast in the eye.

The car guy. She formed a quick impression of a wizened, little old man of German descent who knew auto mechanics backward and forward, and who tinkered under the hoods of everything on wheels, murmuring things like, "Hmmm... Hmmm... Ah hah! De problem, you see, iss viss da discombobulator intravector svitch, vich hass gone kablooey.

All this tinkering was creating superviruses that did not exist outside the lab and that might be more easily transmissible between different species, or more virulent, or more resistant to any influenza vaccine. Most researchers were insistent that these "gain of function" studies were needed to better understand how the flu virus might evolve, but the federal government saw things differently. These experiments were a security risk.

In the context of religious leadership, tinkering with structure is not a first choice of means for building or sustaining quality in an institution. Leadership is the prime concern!

I'm one of those guys who likes to piddle around in the garage and fix stuff.

Under the aegis of wildlife management, the oxymoron that is now a fact of life for most North American creatures, spins unbounded tinkering, with further tinkering made necessary by past tinkering, effects of causes, effects of effects—a "cascade of consequences" precipitated by human intervention, well intended though it may be.

Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral - I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.

No, it's not dissatisfaction that inspires me to tinker with my songs, it's just restlessness.

I spent my childhood tinkering with electronic circuits, on breadboards, as they used to be called, in particular making radio transmitters.

Kuhn was the intellectual of whom many scientists said he's 'telling it as is it is' insofar as talking about a process of 'tinkering' in terms of theory and experiment followed by radical changes. But often, what Kuhn had in mind were some very spectacular incidents in the history of the sciences that changed our way of looking at the world.

I'm not a big fan of the George Lucas school of meddling and tinkering. That's a slippery slope.

As a kid growing up in a rural area, I was always tinkering with parts and machinery.

Building and tinkering were such a huge part of our childhood, whether we were trying to entertain ourselves as kids, helping our parents out on the ranch, or getting creative with school projects.

I think my dad did legal work for someone who had a Packard Bell 8088, and they couldn't pay him, so they gave him a computer. I was initially not allowed to touch it, but that didn't last long. I started tinkering with it, and there were many times I screwed up the computer.

After I joined Google and stopped working on robots - I'd built some self-driving tractors on farms in the meantime - I was always tinkering and playing with robots at home and just as a hobby.

The age of mass politics is one that demands radical solutions rather than tinkering.

MPs are so cowed by the institutions and the scale of official failure that they generally just muddle along tinkering and hope to stay a step ahead of the media.

As long as our laws and ethical codes allow it, they will be able to construct human beings with quite specific characteristics---real works of genetic art. People say that this is 'playing at God'; but they forget that the God (or better, the gods) of the Old Testament created man 'in his image'. He programmed him in the way he wished, and clearly also kept tinkering with his descendants.

Tory housing policy is the epitome of tinkering with the deckchairs while the ship is listing.

A society is an organic system that develops spontaneously, governed by myriad interactions and adjustments that no human mind can pretend to understand. Just because we cannot capture its workings in verbal propositions does not mean it should be scrapped and reinvented according to the fashionable theories of the day. Such ham-fisted tinkering will only lead to unintended consequences, culminating in violent chaos.

We're good at learning by tinkering—which is fortunate, because we're terrible at getting things right the first time.

and experience. Think of how people typically learn: We tinker. We try this. We try that. We see what works and what doesn't. We iterate. We learn. This is experimentation creating experience.

Tinkering is a way of understanding difficult problems, of wrapping our heads around them and quantifying the unknowns.