Engineering Quotes - page 18
I do not see why we should reject all genetic engineering because its technology might, one day, permit such a perversion of decency in the hands of some latter-day Hitler-you may as well outlaw printing because the same machine that composes Shakespeare can also set Mein Kampf. The domino theory does not apply to all human achievements. If we could, by transplanting a bacterial gene, confer disease or cold resistance upon an important crop plant, should we not do so in a world were people suffer so terribly from malnutrition? Must such a benefit imply that, tomorrow, corn and wheat, sea horses and orchids will be thrown into a gigantic vat, torn apart into genetic units, and reassembled into rows of identical human servants? Eternal vigilance, to recombine some phrases, is the price of technological achievement.
Stephen Jay Gould
War is obsolete. It could never have been done before. Only ten years ago... technology reached the point where it could be done. Since then the invisible technological-capability revolution has made it ever easier so to do. It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry. The essence of livingry is human-life advantaging and environment controlling. With the highest aeronautical and engineering facilities of the world redirected from weaponry to livingry production, all humanity would have the option of becoming enduringly successful. All previous revolutions have been political-in them the have-not majority has attempted revengefully to pull down the economically advantaged minority. If realized, this historically greatest design revolution will joyously elevate all humanity to unprecedented heights.
Mike Jones
He was extremely well versed in mechanics, and in the principles and theory of construction, and took the greatest interest in large engineering works. This led to much communication with Stephenson, Brunel, and other Engineers, who consulted him freely on the... great works on which they were engaged: in particular he rendered much assistance in connection with the construction of the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Straits.
George Biddell Airy
I always took myself really seriously... but sometimes I'd be at a venue and the guy would call me ‘sweetie' or ‘honey' when we were doing drums and stuff. I'd carry the drums in myself so people wouldn't say I was a bitch. I went very briefly to an engineering school, so I knew the difference between white noise and pink noise and what a view meter was, and a logs player and things like that. I didn't need to know but it came in handy when I was sitting with Steve Albini like ‘really? Is that a good logs player?' I barely know what it is, but I learned "Smoke On The Water" so I could go to Guitar Center and play that and not have guys look at me. It was a different time-I think girls get taken a lot more seriously now.
Courtney Love
Wagner: There were printers getting more than journalists!
Milne: Yes, I know, but you make it sound as if the natural order has been overthrown. Fish sing in the streets, rivers run uphill, and the printers are getting more than the journalists. Okay - you're worth more than a printer. But look at some of this - "We find the vanishing vicar of Lovers' Leap!" "Sally Smith is a tea lady in a Blackpool engineering works, but it was the way she filled those C-cups which got our cameraman all stirred up!" It's crap. And it's written by grown men earning maybe ten thousand a year. If I was a printer, I'd look at some of the stuff I'm given to print, and I'd ask myself what is supposed to be so special about the people who write it - is that radical enough for you - Dick?
Tom Stoppard
To me politics is just a matter of getting the engineering right. If you have a machine which functions properly without much attention, then it's obviously a good machine. That's what politics should be about. And if the machine has simple working parts which any layman can understand, then it's, as it were, your democratic machine. Am I right or am I wrong?”
"Crazy,” said Makhno, and scratched his nose.
"What?”
"You're not right or wrong. You're crazy.
Michael Moorcock
Things get shaped straight and thin for reasons of aerodynamics. Missiles and skyscrapers are shaped the way they are on the soundest principles of engineering, not as monuments to the dick. In fact, so is the dick. The dick is shaped like a dick because that is the most efficient shape for a dick to be. That's why it's dick shaped. I mean a dick shaped like a table would cause all sorts of practical spatial problems.
Ben Elton
As a guide to engineering ethics, I should like to commend to you a liberal adaptation of the injunction contained in the oath of Hippocrates that the professional man do nothing that will harm his client. Since engineering is a profession which affects the material basis of everyone's life, there is almost always an unconsulted third party involved in any contact between the engineer and those who employ him - and that is the country, the people as a whole. These, too, are the engineer's clients, albeit involuntarily. Engineering ethics ought therefore to safeguard their interests most carefully. Knowing more about the public effects his work will have, the engineer ought to consider himself an "officer of the court” and keep the general interest always in mind.
Hyman G. Rickover
It is not a dream, it is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering, only expensive - blind, faint-hearted, doubting world! . . . Humanity is not yet sufficiently advanced to be willingly led by the discover's keen searching sense. But who knows? Perhaps it is better in this present world of ours that a revolutionary idea or invention instead of being helped and patted, be hampered and ill-treated in its adolescence - by want of means, by selfish interest, pedantry, stupidity and ignorance; that it be attacked and stifled; that it pass through bitter trials and tribulations, through the heartless strife of commercial existence. So do we get our light. So all that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed - only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.
Nikola Tesla
Francisco, an experimental and theoretical biologist, studied what he termed "emergent selves" or "virtual identities." His was an immanent view of reality, based on metaphors derived from self-organization and Buddhist-inspired epistemology rather than on those derived from engineering and information science.
Francisco Varela
Now "cybernetics" is the term coined by Wiener to denote "steersmanship" or the science of control. Although current engineering usage restricts it to the study of flows in closed systems, it can be taken in a wider context, as the study of processes interrelating systems with inputs and outputs, and their structural-dynamic structure. It is in this wider sense that "cybernetics" will be used here, to wit, as system-cybernetics, understanding by "system" an ordered whole in relation to its relevant environment (hence one actually or potentially open).
Ervin László
