Hofmeyr Engineering Quotes

Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure. ~ Henry Petroski

Man cannot help but transcend himself as soon as he begins to design and construct. ~ Samuel Florman

The future of Africa is in innovative engineering. ~ Erik Hersman

The appeal by twentieth-century pluralists to scientific method was also ideologically - and even messianically - driven. It ignored scientific data that interfered with environmentalist assumptions and misrepresented socialist faith as "scientific planning. ~ Paul Edward Gottfried

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

For the future, primarily, we must educate people in science, engineering, technology and math. ~ Buzz Aldrin

My two Jamaican cousins ... were studying engineering. 'That's where the money is,' Mom advised ... I was to be an engineering major, despite my allergy to science and math ... Those who preceded me at CCNY include the polio vaccine discoverer, Dr. Jonas Salk ... and eight Nobel Prize winners ... In class, I stumbled through math, fumbled through physics, and did reasonably well in, and even enjoyed, geology. All I ever looked forward to was ROTC.
Autobiographical comments on his original reason for going to the City College of New York, where he shortly turned to his military career. ~ Colin Powell

The nuclear arms race is over, but the ethical problems raised by nonmilitary technology remain. The ethical problems arise from three "new ages" flooding over human society like tsunamis. First is the Information Age, already arrived and here to stay, driven by computers and digital memory. Second is the Biotechnology Age, due to arrive in full force early in the next century, driven by DNA sequencing and genetic engineering. Third is the Neurotechnology Age, likely to arrive later in the next century, driven by neural sensors and exposing the inner workings of human emotion and personality to manipulation. ~ Freeman Dyson

At its heart, engineering is about using science to find creative, practical solutions. It is a noble profession. ~ Queen Elizabeth II

Well, regular math, or applied math, is what I suppose you could call practical math," he said. "It's used to solve problems, to provide solutions, whether it's in the realm of economics, or engineering, or accounting, or what have you. But pure math doesn't exist to provide immediate, or necessarily obvious, practical applications. It's purely an expression of form, if you will - the only thing it proves is the almost infinite elasticity of mathematics itself, within the accepted set of assumptions by which we define it, of course. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

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

Growing up in India, I knew all I needed to change the world was one good opportunity, and I prepared myself for it. When that opportunity came - in the form of the chance to earn an engineering degree - I was ready. ~ Naveen Jain

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

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

In testing primality of very large numbers chosen at random, the chance of stumbling upon a value that fools the Fermat test is less than the chance that cosmic radiation will cause the computer to make an error in carrying out a "correct" algorithm. Considering an algorithm to be inadequate for the first reason but not for the second illustrates the difference between mathematics and engineering. ~ Harold Abelson

The Stetson passage is an allusion to Frazer theory in The Golden Bough that religion originated as agricultural engineering. Through a grotesque process of literalization, all of the dying gods and heroes in The Golden Bough, along with Christ and the Fisher King, are transferred from mythic to modern consciousness ( Frazer himself was an unabashed positivist) to be made explicable in scientific terms as fertilizer. ~ Jewel Spears Brooker

[Olin] formed a culture of student ownership and engagement…students are not consumers but rather are partners in their education. ~ David Edward Goldberg

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

This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back. And by we, I mean the engineering community. ~ Bruce Schneier

... what society overwhelmingly asks for is snake oil. Of course, the snake oil has the most impressive names - otherwise you would be selling nothing - like "Structured Analysis and Design", "Software Engineering", "Maturity Models", "Management Information Systems", "Integrated Project Support Environments" "Object Orientation" and "Business Process Re-engineering". ~ Edsger Dijkstra

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

I am trying to get at the moral arguments and the ethical status of various attempts at enhancement, or genetic engineering, or the bid for designer children. But there are implications for society at large. ~ Michael Sandel

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

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

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

An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water. ~ Arthur Stanley Eddington

Engineering stimulates the mind. ~ Bruce Dickinson

Engineering circumstances means you put systems, rituals, rules and/or intentions in place to thwart you in the event you try to procrastinate, delay or even fail to perform the tasks you know would ensure your success. ~ Honoree Corder

There has been a substitution of ideology for fact and scientific and engineering data in this administration. ~ Vint Cerf

One of the great inventions of the twentieth century was the studied, methodical engineering of myth for political ends. ~ Caryl Rivers

The letter e may now no longer be used to denote anything other than this positive universal constant. ~ Edmund Landau

Aeronautical engineering texts do not define the goal of their field as making "machines that fly so exactly like pigeons that they can fool even other pigeons. ~ Stuart Russell

There's just one other twist. Googlers working in engineering or product management can nominate themselves for promotion. ~ Laszlo Bock

To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope. ~ Herbert Hoover