ChapterZero

I was in the mood for walking through the engineering books section of the library today– despite all the time I’ve been here at UH, I’ve never really done that before. I just marked the fact that they were there and moved on. Now however, I might have opened up a bigger can of worms and made the library even more dangerous to me than it was before. That is, I found that I am actually interested in some of the topics covered by those books: there was one gigantic book on snow, for instance, that I would read just for the indepth and totally useless trivia it could offer. Anyhow, here are some (annotated) quotes from “Practically Speaking: A Dictionary of Quotations on Engineering, Technology, and Architecture”:

true, sadly, so very true:

The moment you have worked out an answer, start checking it– it probably isn’t right. –Berkeley, Edmund C.

You have to ask a precise question to get a precise answer. –Hodnett, Edward

another standard meme:

Pick the assumptions to pieces till the stuff they are made of is exposed to plain view– this is the cardinal rule for understanding the basis of our beliefs. –Bell, Eric T.

simply, Amen:

We cannot get far by trying to impose an engineering education, however excellent it may be, on a young man of mediocre ability or one temperamentally unfitted for technical or administrative work. The idea reminds me of an experience which my sister had … in India. She had engaged a native electrician to install some new fixtures in her house, but he seemed particularly stupid and kept coming to her for instructions. Finally, in exasperation she said to him: “Why do you come asking questions all the time? Why don’t you use your common sense?” “Madam,” he replied gravely, “common sense is a rare gift of God. I have only a technical education.” –Compton, Karl Taylor

why I desire to be an engineer (or rather, to have the training):

You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and you create what you will. –Shaw, George Bernard

something I need to keep in mind:

It is more important to have a clear understanding of general principles, without, however, thinking of them as fixed laws, than to load the mind with a mass of detailed technical information which can readily be found in reference books or card indexes. –Beveridge, W.I.B.

I could go on, and in fact I might. I’m thinking of starting an engineering quotes db to supplement my standard quotes db. After all, I am an engineer, right? Just day-dreaming: if I did that, then I could serve on topic dynamic quotes from my webpage on the school’s engineering server despite their restrictions on scripting, by embedding a call to a javascript routine stored on this server. Cool… I got the idea from quotes.prolix.nu.

On a related note, I was thinking of practicing my burgeoning LaTeX skills and celebrating successful completion of my numerical methods class by writing up a couple of notes for future generations of UH engineering students. And apparently the powers that be also think that is a good idea, because after giving up when a semester of searching for an approachable library book on numerical methods ended fruitlessly, I just found an excellent book (”Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers”, by H.M. Antia), and I wasn’t even looking anymore. Of course, this is just one more addition to a long list of projects, so I can’t say how much of it I will complete before moving on to either a new project or an old one.

Possibly relevant posts:

• Summer reading list (5/15/2004)
• Winter term courses (11/19/2006)
• Note taking (6/16/2005)