Constructural Engineering Quotes

What I'm trying to do is bring certain of those engineering values into the design process, such that when you think about form you're already incorporating those performance criteria in the process of the generation of forms. ~ Neri Oxman

Even among Sedlacek's own small cell, his Viennese anti-Nazi club, it was not imagined that the pursuit of the Jews had grown quite so systematic. Not only was the story Schindler told him startling simply in moral terms: one was asked to believe that in the midst of a desperate battle, the National Socialists would devote thousands of men, the resources of precious railroads, and enormous cubic footage of cargo space, expensive techniques of engineering, a fatal margin of their research-and-development scientists, a substantial bureaucracy, whole arsenals of automatic weapons, whole magazines of ammunition, all to an extermination which had no military or economic meaning but merely a psychological one. ~ Thomas Keneally

At Swarthmore, the Dean of Women was very opposed to women going into science or engineering - so opposed that if she couldn't talk a girl out of it, she just never had anything more to do with her for the four years she was there. ~ Nancy Roman

The community certainly included black English professors, like my mother, as well as black doctors and dentists, black mechanics, janitors, and contractors, black cobblers, wedding planners, real estate agents, and undertakers, several black lawyers, and a handful of black Mary Kay salespeople. As a child, however, I knew so many African Americans working in science, math, and engineering that I thought that's just what black folks did. ~ Margot Lee Shetterly

Charm took effect, and even progressed. Markus came out of it elegantly. He was smiling with his least Swedish smile possible, almost a kind of Spanish smile. He strung out some tasty anecdotes, skillfully mixed in cultural and personal references, successfully managed transitions from the intimate to the general. He gracefully unfurled a fine piece of engineering known as "man of the world. ~ David Foenkinos

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

Dropbox sweats the user experience details as commendably as it masters the considerable engineering challenges required to reliably sync files everywhere a user may need them. ~ Jeffrey Zeldman

One of the really remarkably beneficial aspects of genetic engineering is that much of the previous methodology for controlling pests and so forth is through chemicals that affect a very broad spectrum of insects, for example, or fungicides that control fungi. ~ Nina Fedoroff

Philosophy in its old form could exist only in the absence of engineering, but with engineering in existence and daily more active and far reaching, the old verbalistic philosophy and metaphysics have lost their reason to exist. They were no more able to understand the "production" of the universe and life than they are now able to understand or grapple with "production" as a means to provide a happier existence for humanity. They failed because their venerated method of "speculation" can not produce, and its place must be taken by mathematical thinking. Mathematical reasoning is displacing metaphysical reasoning. Engineering is driving verbalistic philosophy out of existence and humanity gains decidedly thereby. Only a few parasites and "speculators" will mourn the disappearance of their old companion "speculation." The world of producers -the predominating majority of human beings- will welcome a philosophy of ordered thought and production. ~ Alfred Korzybski

There's a preponderance of scientists and engineers among China's rulers. New President Xi Jinping was trained as a chemical engineer. His predecessor, Hu Jintao, earned a degree in hydraulic engineering. His predecessor, Jiang Zemin, held a degree in electrical engineering. ~ Ramez Naam

Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

A simple social engineering hack might involve leaving a thumb drive on the pavement close to the driver's door of a car. ~ John McAfee

If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must have been vastly complex in the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it! ~ Richard Dawkins

The intelligence we will create from the reverse-engineering of the brain will have access to its own source code and will be able to rapidly improve itself in an accelerating iterative design cycle. Although there is considerable plasticity in the biological human brain, as we have seen, it does have a relatively fixed architecture, which cannot be significantly modified, as well as a limited capacity. We are unable to increase its 300 million pattern recognizers to, say, 400 million unless we do so nonbiologically. Once we can achieve that, there will be no reason to stop at a particular level of capability. We can go on to make it a billion pattern recognizers, or a trillion. ~ Ray Kurzweil

You may be in a medical or engineering college, but not all will stand first in class. It depends on who studies the most. ~ Anupam Kher

Liberals tend to view traditions, policies, and morals of past generations as arbitrary designs put in place by less enlightened people. Because of this, liberals don't pay much attention to why traditions developed or wonder about possible ramifications of their social engineering. ~ John Hawkins

Ren crossed his arms over his chest. "is it LoJacked?"
"Of course," Andy said indignantly. "That's my baby. I even have a kill switch on her."
"Then stop the engine."
Andy appeared downright horrified by Ren's suggestion. "Are you out of your mind? What if someone hits it for stalling? I had that thing on order for over a year. Custom hand built. The epitome of German engineering. I even paid extra for the paint on her. Ain't no way I'm going to chance someone denting my baby. Or, God forbid, totaling it."
Jess rolled his eyes at the boy's hissy fit. If he kept that up, he'd be putting Andy back in diapers.
He turned to Ren. "You take the air. I'll get a bike." Then he focused his attention on Andy again. "And you-"
Andy held his cell phone out to him. "Have an app. Track her down, get my car back, and beat the hell out of her ... in that precise order. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

You get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won't fall down or airplanes that won't suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don't want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. ~ Neal Stephenson

Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems. ~ Scott Adams

Her life seemed to her a great engineering work scarcely begun. Lately more excavation than construction had occurred. She had lost a sense of her own invincibility. In that way she was no longer archetypically American. ~ Marge Piercy

Esmeralda?" Scarlett turned to the witch next. "Don't you want to do magic, again?"

"Of course I do! It's the only thing I dream of. Casting spells… Turning people into frogs… Genetically engineering my gingerbread army… ~ Cassandra Gannon

Yeah, I think that his great creation was not any one product but a company in which creativity was connected to great engineering. And that will survive at least while the current people who trained under Steve are there. ~ Walter Isaacson

But the 20th century suffered "two" ideologies that led to genocides. The other one, Marxism, had no use for race, didn't believe in genes and denied that human nature was a meaningful concept. Clearly, it's not an emphasis on genes or evolution that is dangerous. It's the desire to remake humanity by coercive means (eugenics or social engineering) and the belief that humanity advances through a struggle in which superior groups (race or classes) triumph over inferior ones. ~ Steven Pinker

He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet. ~ Nell Zink

I came to speak ill of Swedish engineering, and so diddled myself out of a Nobel Prize. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering... these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love... these are what we stay alive for. ~ Walt Whitman

Nature is regulating our climate for free. Mother Nature, she's been doing that for free, for a long, long time. Now do you really want to get in there and do geo-engineering and all this kind of stuff? ~ Thomas Friedman

The federal government was responsible for building the levees, engineering the levees, and consequentially, the federal government is responsible for repairing the damage that has been done, which has not been completed yet. ~ Mitch Landrieu

Engineering is merely the slow younger brother of physics. ~ Steven Molaro

I went to engineering school, I went to physics class. I said, 'Screw this, I don't want to be here. I'd much rather be at a club playing music.' ~ Huey Lewis

Being smart in the arts is the same as being smart in engineering is the same as being smart in writing is the same as being smart in anything, really. It's the ability to manipulate all the pieces of the puzzle in your mind, try to fit them together, and when they don't fit quite right ... you sand the edges/corners and make them all fit. ~ Gerald Jay Sussman

Expertise in a subfield was the key to a successful career as an engineer, and expertise was becoming a necessity for the mathematicians and computers as well. ~ Margot Lee Shetterly

It's true that to speak of an ethic of giftedness, which is very much the ethic that I deploy in raising questions about designer children and genetic engineering - an appreciation of the giftedness of the child or the giftedness of life does have religious resonance, because a great many religious traditions emphasize the sense in which the good things in life are not all our own doing; they are gifts from God. ~ Michael Sandel

A beaver does not, as legend would have it, know which direction the tree will fall when he cuts it, but counts on alacrity to make up for lack of engineering expertise. ~ Ann Zwinger

Choose one thing and become a master of it. Choose a second thing and become a master of that. When you become a master of two worlds (say, engineering and business), you can bring them together in a way that will a) introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before and b) create a competitive advantage because you can move between worlds, speak both languages, connect the tribes, mash the elements to spark fresh creative insight until you wake up with the epiphany that changes your life. ~ Justine Musk

Statistics is, or should be, about scientific investigation and how to do it better, but many statisticians believe it is a branch of mathematics. Now I agree that the physicist, the chemist, the engineer, and the statistician can never know too much mathematics, but their objectives should be better physics, better chemistry, better engineering, and in the case of statistics, better scientific investigation. Whether in any given study this implies more or less mathematics is incidental. ~ George E.P. Box

He wondered if other Shifters had the same homing instinct for a teleportation departure point. It never lasted long, maybe a couple of hours, a half day at most, like a subconscious computer memory. It baffled scientists years after they had first examined Lock's abilities. Nobody had come up with an answer for that ability and Lock was unaware of how he did it. It simply existed, like his other skills. ~ J.M. Johnson

Persons who reach the higher rungs in business management, selling, engineering, religious work, writing, acting & in every other pursuit get there by following conscientiously & continuously a plan for self-development & growth. ~ David J. Schwartz

Our vision is to rediscover the spirit of the Renaissance, create a new discipline where engineering for cultural heritage is actually a symbol of blending art and science together. ~ Maurizio Seracini

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

Let's also make sure that a high school diploma puts our kids on a path to a good job. Right now, countries like Germany focus on graduating their high school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges, so that they're ready for a job. At schools like P-TECh in Brooklyn ... students will graduate with a high school diploma and an associate degree in computers or engineering. We need to give every American student opportunities like this. ~ Barack Obama

I went to Carnegie Mellon and was an electrical engineer, but electrical engineering wasn't right for me. ~ David M. Kelley

There's a saying in engineering: You can build things cheap, fast, or right, but not all three. ~ Temple Grandin

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong. ~ H.L. Mencken