Allshouse Engineering Quotes

An engineer cannot participate in irrationality ... ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I think we can question whether degrees are antediluvian. Online learning has flexibility. Why not master courses in energy, writing, communications, and engineering and get a credential? ~ Anant Agarwal

I've learned that your intuition about things you don't know that much about isn't very good," Page said. "The way Elon talks about this is that you always need to start with the first principles of a problem. What are the physics of it? How much time will it take? How much will it cost? How much cheaper can I make it? There's this level of engineering and physics that you need to make judgments about what's possible and interesting. Elon is unusual in that he knows that, and he also knows business and organization and leadership and governmental issues. ~ Ashlee Vance

The purpose of a business is to get and keep a customer. Without customers, no amount of engineering wizardry, clever financing, or operations expertise can keep a company going. ~ Theodore Levitt

I went to school for engineering, I studied jazz. So I always had this kind of creative side and technical side, and I thought architecture might be the way to combine them, so I went to architecture school in New York. ~ Joseph Kosinski

Engineering stimulates the mind. ~ Bruce Dickinson

Our yearning for democracy is accompanied by a no less profound yearning for peace. And the media also faced the task of historical engineering to establish this required truth. We therefore have phenomena called 'peace missions' and the 'peace process'. These are terms that apply to whatever the United States happens to be doing or advocating at some moment ... in short, 'War is Peace'. ~ Noam Chomsky

To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That's what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games - nothing like saving the world. ~ Elon Musk

We must not blame programmers for their bugs. They belong to them only until the code is merged to the repository. After that, all bugs are ours! ~ Yegor Bugayenko

Knowing there is a structure, hidden or felt, to the random gives pleasure. ~ Cecil Balmond

Unless you took courses in architecture, engineering, or pre-med, the rest of your liberal arts education hardly prepares you for life as the business warrior and champion you envision yourself to be. ~ Gene Simmons

But remember this, Japanese boy ... airplanes are not tools for war. They are not for making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality. ~ Hayao Miyazaki

With this, in a powerful sense, our Question has been answered. The world, insofar as we speak of the world of Chemistry, biology, astrophysics, engineering, and everyday life, does embody beautiful ideas. The Core, which governs those domains, is profoundly rooted in concepts of symmetry and geometry, as we have seen. And it works its will, in quantum theory, through music-like rules. Symmetry really does determine structure. A pure and perfect Music of the Spheres really does animate the soul of reality. Plato and Pythagoras: We salute you! ~ Frank Wilczek

Corporations continue to do their dirty work in poor countries. At the turn of the 21st century, the World Bank put pressure on Bolivia to privatize water services. Bechtel, the engineering giant, took control of this vital resource in Cochabamba. Bechtel's executives immediately raised the price of water so high that most people could not afford it. Its contract, made in collusion with the Bolivian government, gave Bechtel the right to charge people for water they took from their own wells. Bechtel even sent collectors into people's homes to demand payment for rainwater that people gathered in pots and pans on their roofs. ~ David Zindell

In software, the chain isn't as strong as its weakest link; it's as weak as all the weak links multiplied together. ~ Steve McConnell

A hacker is someone who uses a combination of high-tech cybertools and social engineering to gain illicit access to someone else's data. ~ John McAfee

Techniques such as genetic engineering, psychoactive drugs and electronic control of the brain make possible a transformation of the species into docile, fully-obedient, 'safe' organisms. ~ William Sims

When the maker's (or fixer's) activity is immediately situated within a community of use, it can be enlivened by this kind of direct perception. Then the social character of his work isn't separate from its internal or "engineering" standards; the work is improved through relationships with others. It may even be the case that what those standards are, what perfection consists of, is something that comes to light only through these iterated exchanges with others who use the product, as well as other craftsmen in the same trade. Through work that had this social character, some shared conception of the good is lit up, and becomes concrete. ~ Matthew B. Crawford

When Angkorian society began, Paris and London were not much more than elaborate villages. Europe was crawling with barbarians, and here were the Khmer engineering sophisticated irrigation systems and constructing the biggest temple in the world. ~ Kim Fay

After dinner, Holden took a long, slow tour of his new ship. He opened every door, looked in every closet, turned on every panel, and read every readout. He stood in engineering next to the fusion reactor and closed his eyes, getting used to the almost subliminal vibration she made. If something ever went wrong with it, he wanted to feel it in his bones before any warning ever sounded. ~ James S.A. Corey

The whole conception of man already endowed with a mind capable of conceiving civilization setting out to create it is fundamentally false. Man did not simply impose upon the world a pattern created by his mind. His mind is itself a system that constantly changes as a result of his endeavor to adapt himself to his surroundings. It would be an error to believe that, to achieve a higher civilization, we have merely to put into effect the ideas now guiding us. If we are to advance, we must leave room for a continuous revision of our present conceptions and ideals which will be necessitated by further experience. We are as little able to conceive what civilization will be, or can be, five hundred or even fifty years hence as our medieval forefathers or even our grandparents were able to foresee our manner of life today. ~ Friedrich A. Hayek

Virtually any pointed edifice is considered a candidate for alien engineering. After all, how could the Egyptians or Mayans have possibly stacked up stone blocks into pyramids? ~ Seth Shostak

Birds in flight fascinate me. I admire eagles and falcons. I'm inspired by a feather but also its color, its graphics, its weightlessness and its engineering. It's so elaborate. In fact I try and transpose the beauty of a bird to women. ~ Alexander McQueen

Social pressure is the fascism of the democracies. Fascism is the democracy of the ruthless. Social engineering is the opiate of romantic intellectuals. ~ Michael D. O'Brien

Man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering - that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Normal people ... believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet. ~ Scott Adams

I kind of think of engineering like the chefs at a restaurant. Nobody's going to deny chefs are integrally important, but there's also so many other people who contribute to a great meal. ~ Ben Silbermann

improvements and drive engineering excellence across ~ Anonymous

Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce. ~ Benoit Mandelbrot

Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure. ~ Henry Petroski

You must excuse my gruff conduct," the watchdog said, after they'd been driving for some time, "but you see it's traditional for watchdogs to be ferocious. ~ Norton Juster

Why give a robot an order to obey orders - why aren't the original orders enough? Why command a robot not to do harm - wouldn't it be easier never to command it to do harm in the first place? Does the universe contain a mysterious force pulling entities toward malevolence, so that a positronic brain must be programmed to withstand it? Do intelligent beings inevitably develop an attitude problem? (…) Now that computers really have become smarter and more powerful, the anxiety has waned. Today's ubiquitous, networked computers have an unprecedented ability to do mischief should they ever go to the bad. But the only mayhem comes from unpredictable chaos or from human malice in the form of viruses. We no longer worry about electronic serial killers or subversive silicon cabals because we are beginning to appreciate that malevolence - like vision, motor coordination, and common sense - does not come free with computation but has to be programmed in. (…) Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem! ~ Steven Pinker

During the nineteenth century, the rapid emergence and proliferation of new manufacturing methods and building technologies led to the establishment of polytechnic schools that concentrated on the practicalities of engineering and construction rather than the niceties of stylistic correctness or adherence to established precedent. ~ Martin Filler

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. ~ Jessica Livingston

With the advent of genetic engineering the time required for the evolution of new species may literally collapse. ~ Dee Hock

By separating the function of adaptation from the function of maintaining the integrity of individual genes, sex allows much greater diversity while still keeping genes whole. Sex is not only fun, it is good engineering practice. ~ Seth Lloyd

The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering. What are the necessary steps in learning any art? The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, and about various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one - my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art. But, aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art - the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art. This holds true for music, for medicine, for carpentry - and for love. And, maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important ~ Erich Fromm

Engineering serendipity is this idea that we can help people come across unexpected but helpful connections at a better than random rate. And in some ways it's based on trying to reassess this notion of serendipitous as lucky - to think of serendipitous as smart. ~ Ethan Zuckerman

Automation is cost cutting by tightening the corners and not cutting them. ~ Haresh Sippy

One can expect the human race to continue attempting systems just within or just beyond our reach; and software systems are perhaps the most intricate and complex of man's handiworks. The management of this complex craft will demand our best use of new languages and systems, our best adaptation of proven engineering management methods, liberal doses of common sense, and a God-given humility to recognize our fallibility and limitations. ~ Fred Brooks

In South Texas I saw three interesting things. The first was a tiny girl, maybe ten years old, driving in a 1965 Cadillac. She wasn't going very fast, because I passed her, but still she was cruising right along, with her head tilted back and her mouth open and her little hands gripping the wheel.

Then I saw an old man walking up the median strip pulling a wooden cross behind him. It was mounted on something like a golf cart with two spoked wheels. I slowed down to read the hand-lettered sign on his chest.

JACKSONVILLE
FLA OR BUST

I had never been to Jacksonville but I knew it was the home of the Gator Bowl and I had heard it was a boom town, taking in an entire county or some such thing. It seemed an odd destination for a religious pilgrim. Penance maybe for some terrible sin, or some bargain he had worked out with God, or maybe just a crazed hiker. I waved and called out to him, wishing him luck, but he was intent on his marching and had no time for idle greetings. His step was brisk and I was convinced he wouldn't bust.

The third interesting thing was a convoy of stake-bed trucks all piled high with loose watermelons and cantaloupes. I was amazed. I couldn't believe that the bottom ones weren't crushed under all that weight, exploding and spraying hazardous melon juice onto the highway. One of nature's tricks with curved surfaces. Topology! I had never made it that far in mathematics and engineering studies, and I knew no ~ Charles Portis

Approaching the Williamsburg Bridge - not really certain of how he had managed to find himself there - he experienced an extraordinary moment of buoyancy, of grace. There was a lot more traffic now, but his shifting was smooth and the sturdy little car was adroit at changing lanes. He launched himself out over the East River. He could feel the bridge humming underneath his wheels and all around him could sense the engineering of it, the forces and tensions and rivets that were all conspiring to keep him aloft. To the south, he glimpsed the Manhattan Bridge, with its Parisian air, refined, elegant, its skirts hiked to reveal tapered steel legs, and, beyond, the Brooklyn Bridge, like a great ropy strand of muscle. In the other direction lay the Queensboro Bridge, like two great iron tsarinas linking hands to dance. And before him, the city that had sheltered him and swallowed him and made him a modest fortune loomed, gray and brown, festooned with swags and boas of some misty gray stuff, a compound of harbor fog and spring dew and its own steamy exhalations. Hope had been his enemy, a frailty that he must at all costs master, for so long now that it was a moment before he was willing to concede that he had let it back into his heart. ~ Michael Chabon

The question of engineering should be of interest not only to those of us who are engineers, but to the entire public which lives in an engineering world ~ Karl Taylor Compton

Enlightened social engineering is required to face situations that demand global action now. Education is a long-term solution. Parents and the general public must be reached also Otherwise, children and youth enrolled in globally oriented programs may find themselves in conflict with values assumed in the home. And then the educational institution frequently comes under scrutiny and must pull back. ~ John Goodlad

Yet through their endeavor, men would glimpse the unimaginable artistry of Yahweh's work, in seeing how ingeniously the world had been constructed. By this construction, Yahweh's work was indicated, and Yahweh's work was concealed. ~ Ted Chiang