Quotes About Precision

proverbial pros from Dover

He picked the milk off the porch, and then searched for a moment before finding the newspaper in the bushes near the door. The copy of the International Herald Tribune was wrapped in a plastic bag to protect it from the weather, indicating the paperboy had better sense than he had aim.

Used a Barrett .50 rifle, big mother, like an old BAR on steroids. Shoots the .50 round from the Ma Deuce machine gun. Accurate as hell, and it makes for a definitive hit, y'know? Kinda hard to walk away with a half-inch hole in you.

When you dealt with explosives, you didn't rush and you didn't take chances.

It was worth repeating, because it constituted the First Law of Sentient Ordnance: Thou shalt not blow up the wrong planet. On that point the programmers had been insistent to the point of fussiness. Accordingly

And if I've got to die, I want to die an editor.

We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.

And I am too knowledgeable now to hurt people imprecisely

It is perhaps worth noting here that even Hayek cannot be held responsible for the ideological simplifications of his acolytes. Like Keynes, he regarded economics as an interpretive science, not amenable to prediction or precision.

Perhaps thee will best understand what Abigail is like if I tell thee that when she quilts she prefers to stitch in the ditch, hiding her poor stitches in the seams between the blocks.

Appliqué is very popular here. To my eye it has a facile look about it, as if the maker has not thought hard but simply cut out whatever shape has taken her fancy and sewn it on to a bit of cloth. Piecing together patchwork, on the other hand, requires more consideration and more accuracy; that is why I like it, though some say it is too cold and geometrical.

I hate clocks. They tick. Other things make noises in their time and need, but clocks mechanically beat the seconds to death.

Squares were good. Efficient. He approved of squares.

practice doesn't make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect.

It takes you 500,000 microseconds just to click a mouse. But if you're a Wall Street algorithm and you're five microseconds behind, you're a loser.

Kernighan and Plauger noted that "a comment is of zero (or negative) value if it is wrong.

Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.

I once wrote deduceable instead of deducible in a book, though nobody then or since has taken me up on it. A small point as they go, perhaps, but Rule I of writing acceptably is to get everything right as far as you can, and in this case I had neglected to.

There's something about doing a job well that is akin to art.

he stressed that the main feature of science is economy of thought;

we have realized that it is our immediate intuitions that are imprecise:

We are structured to manage precisely this: information; and remain in existence thanks to this.

you can invite trouble if you slouch, avoid eye contact, use vague, imprecise language, and are generally sloppy in your attire.

I like that. Every time. Instead of 'anytime.' It's pointed." "Well, I mean it.