Quotes About Precision

The process is called estimation, not exactimation. —Phillip Armour

Design is sloppy because a good solution is often only subtly different from a poor one.

One effective approach is to determine a range of accuracy that is acceptable and then use a boolean function to determine whether the values are close enough.

A need for precision and perfection has always been an enemy of art, which is about coloring outside the lines. It is also an enemy of the reality that following Jesus is a journey, not an arrival.

Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.

Porque no hay nada como la pura fuerza de los números para retirar capas de confusión y contradicción.

Knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, can make a complicated world less so.

As Albert Einstein liked to say, everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Tis much better to do a little with certainty and leave the rest for others that come after than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.

PORTABLE WATCHES (1500)

PENDULUM CLOCK (1656)

BALANCE SPRING WATCHES (1660)

Emoticons as a new class of oversignifying precision grammar.

In drawing a wall, he said, "the artist who must copy every small stone and each stroke of whitewash has missed his calling: he should have become a bricklayer.

In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award for accomplishing with pinpoint precision and unerring reliability, the feat of sitting exactly where it is sitting. Nothing would prevent us from agreeing with the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn that rocks are smarter than cats because rocks have the sense to go away when you kick them.

As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.

Keep in mind a bit of wisdom from the linguist Ann Farmer: 'It isn't about being right. It's about getting it right.

Complex organs evolve by small steps for the same reason that a watchmaker does not use a sledgehammer and a surgeon does not use a meat cleaver.

A commitment to the concrete does more than just ease communication; it can lead to better reasoning.

a bit of wisdom from the linguist Ann Farmer: "It isn't about being right. It's about getting it right.

I also get a perverse pleasure from correcting students who refer to an important piece of data or write that this data is important. (Data is the plural of datum, I tell them, so one ought to say, The datum is important; The data are important.) Yet

Every seam, every lace, every bead has been painstakingly, with love, corrected, perfected and mastered.

Actually, I have a lot of hobbies, but I've kept up with model-building the longest. In particular, I love military models.

In the successful organization, no detail is too small to escape close attention.