Hydrology Quotes

“Who scouts through wilderness and cold
And finds the stone that turns to gold,
The gems of Nature's wealth untold--
The Engineer.

Who gets five paltry plunks per day
To give the thing he finds away
To some one else who makes it pay--
The Engineer.

Who's heart is always in the game,
When trouble comes it's just the same,
But when it comes, who gets the blame?
The Engineer.

- Robert Elmer Horton (Water Power and Water Supply Preliminaries, 1913, Michigan Engineer)”
― Robert Elmer Horton

“A tangent that departs from the real to the imaginary: pure consciousness does and does not transcend the body, and I believe this after hearing that my mother felt suicidal after she took her medicines for weight loss and her biggest regrets in life came crushing down on her for three days in a row. This is the best of what I have learnt in my years of fascination for science and knowledge, and to make you grasp this takes fullness of life: in hydrology, the wet and the dry, and the hot and the cold always co-exist, but they are also in flux and are also stable: all depending on the reference point of analysis. Consciousness beyond matter, and consciousness tied to matter co-exist in everyplace at different scales, and sometimes even in the same scale. Tao te ching (the way and its power) that fascinated Lao Tzu; the calculus of infinitesimals; the wonderful infinity of the number line and fractals that fascinated Ramanujan and Mandelbrot; the horn of the rhinoceros that fascinated Dali, thermodynamic and hydrodynamic equilibriums that fascinate all scientists, the surety of a fading perfume smell or the permanence of a shattered mirror that is easy to understand to anyone; the concepts of anti-fragility, entropy, volatility, randomness, disorder are all intimately tied to this. Consciousness is constantly attainted and broken all around us all the time, and we rarely stop to think about this because it infinitesimally evades us. Here is where I begin to stretch this and I can't understand it and it is very discouraging -- prudence, temperance and courage -- some of the highest virtues may also be related to this. When you are prepared, it is consciousness. When we are unprepared for it, and this hits you without hurting you, it is magic and strength. Else, perhaps death.”
― Solomon Vimal