Top 543 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Engineers - Page 6

No price is too great to preserve the health of the fleet.

In less than 70 hours, three astronauts will be launched on the flight of Apollo 8 from the Cape Kennedy Space Center on a research journey to circle the moon. This will involve known risks of great magnitude and probable risks which have not been foreseen. Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and 1.5 million systems, subsystems and assemblies. With 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects. Hence the striving for perfection and the use of redundancy which characterize the Apollo program.

Everybody thinks their website is above average.

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong

Either you participate in the community like an adult or you leave and do your own thing.

The task of the software development team is to engineer the illusion of simplicity.

Roger Waters isn't a "great" singer but he's always able to communicate this intense desperation. At times he's not even singing, but shouting. There's no melody and his shouting isn't even in key with the song.

A dynamic duo who work well together can be worth any three people working in isolation.

I am a complete, mature, self-sufficient being.

Who knows for sure how complex or how uncomplex the ancient people's lives were.

Anyone who's not interested in model airplanes must have a screw loose somewhere.

The purpose of the Reichsautobahnen is to become the roads of Adolf Hitler.

Not only did he teach by accomplishment, but he taught by the inspiration of a marvelous imagination that refused to accept the permanence of what appeared to others to be insuperable difficulties: an imagination of the goals of which, in a number of instances, are still in the realms of speculation.

As far as I'm concerned, the sheriff's department has done an excellent job in Savoy. The department has responded to the needs of our citizens, so I don't want to mess with a system that is working well for us.

I think we're just going to have to live with the microcosm in the electronic world of the kind of things that we might see in the physical world.

I can pinpoint the moment when my first band recorded, when I was 14 and 15 years old. I always enjoyed writing songs and playing, but there was something about going in and capturing it that felt very Zen and perfect for me. A light switch went on and I just realized that's where my musical capacity was the most suited. I just followed on blind faith that that was like a calling for me.

I believe seeing earth a small blue ball in the vast dark ocean of space, gives you a new perspective on life and what is important. You can see how small we are as compared to the universe and how fragile our lives are.

We will soon be living in an era in which we cannot guarantee survivability of any single point. However, we can still design systems in which system destruction requires the enemy to pay the price of destroying n of n stations. If n is made sufficiently large, it can be shown that highly survivable system structures can be built.

Good software, like wine, takes time.

To break the power of the big corporations, we would propose that the biggest 500 corporations that dominate the rigged economy and political system should be taken into public ownership, and run democratically.

Moore's Law is really a thing about human activity, it's about vision, it's about what you're allowed to believe. Because people are really limited by their beliefs, they limit themselves by what they allow themselves to believe about what is possible.

Goal setting has traditionally been based on past performance. This practice has tended to perpetuate the sins of the past.

Don't speak if you don't have to about trivia. The time for joking comes because of the trust, and you have to earn the trust. So, I don't alibi for anything, and I'll take the heat. That's the other thing. Don't let them take the heat. We take the heat.

Look at any financial institution, at any bank. They're all photocopies of each other. There's no diversity of institutions and even less diversity of currency. Therefore, just as you say its very logical that an ecosystem like this will collapse, it's very predictable a monetary system like this will collapse, too. And it hasn't finished collapsing, by the way.

All agreed that the sensation of coasting on the air was delightful.

Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae. Precisely the opposite impression is obtained from many of our present day text books and publications.

I'm always excited and enthusiastic to have women join the technical side of the industry. Without making ridiculous stereotypes, which this might be, I have had clients - male and female - who said they feel more comfortable working with a woman in the mastering capacity for various reasons.

When teachers are forced to teach to the test, students get bored and genuine education ceases, no matter what the test scores may say… The examination as a test of the past is of no value for increased learning ability. Like all external motivators, it can produce a short term effect, but examinations for the purpose of grading the past do not hook a student on learning for life.

There is an attraction and a charm inherent in the colossal that is not subject to ordinary theories of art ... The tower will be the tallest edifice ever raised by man. Will it therefore be imposing in its own way?

History has shown that there are very few mechanisms as effective at maintaining the status quo as a set of institutionalized regulations. Once set in regulatory concrete, reconsideration of the basic underlying assumptions is very difficult. While it will be an uphill fight to re-examine the basic underlying assumptions of any law or administrative rule, it is clearly not impossible. It will just take longer than if not so well institutionalized.

For decades engineers have stood accused that their buildings do not have any cultural value. We have attempted to liberate engineering of this accusation. As National Socialists we are dedicated to working with boldness, but also with love of the Volk and our landscape in mind. These roads do not serve transportation alone, they also bind our Fatherland. In these highways our engineering will reflect the National Socialist movement.

The best way to get a project done faster is to start sooner

In the field of Artificial Intelligence there is no more iconic and controversial milestone than the Turing Test, when a computer convinces a sufficient number of interrogators into believing that it is not a machine but rather is a human. It is fitting that such an important landmark has been reached at the Royal Society in London, the home of British Science and the scene of many great advances in human understanding over the centuries. This milestone will go down in history as one of the most exciting.

Musicians are like politicians. They're the last people who should be making music, just like politicians are the last people who should be running things.

We offer them mediocrity while calling it magic. We offer them the illusion of intelligent software, seducing them into surrendering the task of thinking to the machine. Of course, the machine isn't thinking, which means that nobody is.

Every day that we spent not improving our products was a wasted day.

If you aren’t even aware that the people in the organization disagree with you, then you are in trouble

The real fighter knows perfectly well that there is no difference between victory and defeat, friend and enemy, day and night, life and death.

This speaker reminds me of my childhood in Budapest. There were gypsy magicians who came to town to entertain us children. But as I recollect, there was one important difference: the gypsy only seemed to violate the laws of nature, he never really violated them!

I didn't view my body as broken, I reasoned that a human being can never be broken. Technology is broken. Technology is inadequate.

An engineer can do for a dollar what any fool can do for two

The alleviation of human error, whether design or intrinsically human, continues to be the most important problem facing aerospace safety.

Logic can be patient, for it is eternal.

I've... learned that it's a hell of a lot easier to just build something than to try to convince somebody who doesn't believe it's possible.

The greatest risk we face in software development is that of overestimating our own knowledge.

When engineers and quantity surveyors discuss aesthetics and architects study what cranes do we are on the right road.

The cleaner and nicer the program, the faster it's going to run. And if it doesn't, it'll be easy to make it fast.

The further conquest of space will make it possible, for example, to create systems of satellites making daily revolutions around our planet at an altitude of some 40,000 kilometers, and to assure universal communications and the relaying of radio and television transmissions. Such an arrangement might prove more useful, economically, than the construction of radio relay systems over the whole surface of the earth. The great accuracy of movement of these satellites will provide a reliable basis for solving navigational problems

Although people who had achieved a great deal in science and technology talked of the inscrutability of creativity, I was not convinced and disbelieved them immediately and without argument. Why should everything but creativity be open to scrutiny? What kind of process can this be which unlike all others is not subject to control?…What can be more alluring than the discovery of the nature of talented thought and converting this thinking from occasional and fleeting flashes into a powerful and controllable fire of knowledge.

It seems to me that it had no other rationale than to show that we are not simply the country of entertainers, but also that of engineers and builders called from across the world to build bridges, viaducts, stations and major monuments of modern industry, the Eiffel Tower deserves to be treated with consideration.

I'm a firm believer in shades of gray.

The Soviet Union has become the seacoast of the universe.

David Langford, illustrates the difference between teaching and learning in a little story. He says, 'You know, last Wednesday I taught my dog to whistle. I really did. I taught him to whistle. It was hard work. I really went at it very hard. But I taught him to whistle. Of course, he didn't learn, but I taught.'

In fast moving markets, adaptation is significantly more important than optimization.

Indeed, through fundamental advances in bionics in this century, we will set the technological foundation for an enhanced human experience, and we will end disability.

The monogram of our national initials, which is the symbol for our monetary unit, the dollar, is almost as frequently conjoined to the figures of an engineer's calculations as are the symbols indicating feet, minutes, pounds, or gallons. ... This statement, while true in regard to the work of all engineers, applies particularly to that of the mechanical engineer.

We built a jet airplane to get in and out of a 5,000-ft field. No one believed it could be done.

The record producer is the music world's equivalent of a film director.

The market is perfectly well supplied at the moment but spare capacity is very limited.

. . . my pilot pointed to his left front and above, and looking in the direction he pointed, I saw a long dark brown form fairly streaking across the sky. We could see that it was a German machine, and when it got above and behind our middle machine, it dived on it for all the world like a huge hawk on a hapless sparrow.