Like nuclear power, genetic engineering is not a neutral technology. It is by its very nature too powerful for our present state o...f social and scientific development, no matter whose hands are controlling it. Just as we would say, especially after Chernobyl, that a nuclear power plant is just as dangerous in a socialist nation as it is in a capitalist one, so I would say the same thing for genetic engineering. It is inherently Eugenic in that it always requires someone to decide what is a good and a bad gene.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Women think that an engineer is a man in hip boots building a dam. They don't realize that 95 percent of engineering is done in a ...nice air-conditioned office.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Kitchens were different then, too--not only what came out of them, but their smells and sounds. A hot pie cooling smells different... from a frozen pie thawing. Oilcloth and linoleum and apples in an open bowl and ruffled rubber aprons make a different aromatic mix from Formica and ceramic tile and mangoes in an acrylic fruit ripener and plastic-coated aprons printed with "Who invited all these tacky people?" And the kitchen sounds. I am not sure that today's kitchen is noisier. But the noises are different. Today you get the song of the food processor and the blender, the intermittent hum of the reefer and the freezer, the buzz-slosh-and-grunt of the dishwasher, the violently audible digestive processes of the waste disposal in the sink. Then it was the whir and clatter of the hand-powered eggbeater, the thunk-thunk-thunk of somebody mashing potatoes, or, in green-pea season, the crisp pop of pea pod and the rattle-rattle-rattle of peas into the pan.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had first discovered a propensity for savagery in the acrid lavatories of a minor English public school where he used to press ...the heads of the new boys into the ceramic bowl and pull the flush upon them to drown their gurgling protests.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mining today is an affair of mathematics, of finance, of the latest in engineering skill. Cautious men behind polished desks in Sa...n Francisco figure out in advance the amount of metal to a cubic yard, the number of yards washed a day, the cost of each operation. They have no need of grubstakes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In academic science, interdisciplinary work is productive and praised, but is relatively rare. Scientists don't need to cooperate ...to have their results fit together: they are all describing different parts of the same thing--nature--so in the long run, their results tend to come together into a single picture. Engineering, however, is different. Because it is more creative (it actually creates complex things), it demands more attention to teamwork. If the finished parts are going to work together, they must be developed by groups that share a common picture of what each part must accomplish. Engineers in different disciplines are forced to communicate; the challenge of management and team-building is to make that communication happen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original i...deas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Medicine, law, business, engineering. These are noble pursuits. And necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love. ...These are what we stay alive for.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both Leonardo and Newton had fecund imaginations from which poured forth a stream of discoveries, gadgets, engineering marvels, an...d farsighted contrivances. Newton invented the reflecting telescope, Leonardo the helicopter; Newton, the binomial theorem, Leonardo, the parachute, submarine, and tank. Newton's discover ies were expressed in equations. Leonardo's in drawings. Leonardo made many contributions to science, both in theory and application, but he is principally featured in art history classes. Newton wrote lengthy exegeses on alchemy, the mysteries of the Trinity, and the authority of the Bible, yet he is considered history's premier physicist.... Each man transformed the science of his day from one that held an essentially static view of the universe into one that included motion. The subject of motion consumed them both and their greatest contributions to humankind grew out of an intense curiosity about it. Newton's ambitious desire to explain celes tial movements resulted in the formulation of his three famous laws of motion and his discovery of the inverse square law of gravitation. Leonardo's compelling studies of the muscular movements of men and horses, exemplified in his cartoons for his Battle of Anghiari, are the most detailed anatomical descriptions of men and animals in motion that have ever been produced.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To define it rudely but not inaptly, engineering ... is the art of doing that well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with ...two after a fashion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »