Don

“I need to discuss science vs. engineering. Put glibly:
In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it.
In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it.”
― Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

“Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

“the current situation being a toss-up as to what you want to believe. Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal. Hence you will find that often what you believe is what you want to believe, rather than being the result of careful thinking.”
― Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

“A second reason the systems engineer’s design is never completed is the solution offered to the original problem usually produces both deeper insight and dissatisfactions in the engineers themselves. Furthermore, while the design phase continually goes from proposed solution to evaluation and back again and again, there comes a time when this process of redefinement must stop and the real problem be coped with—thus giving what they realize is, in the long run, a suboptimal solution.”
― Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn