"There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers. While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain."--Baron Rothschild, ca. 1800
"God help us. We're in the hands of engineers."--from Jurassic Park
There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring
the changes on its corollaries; that's philosophy. Two: Record many
facts. Try to find a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next
fact; that's science. Three: Be aware that you live in a malevolent
Universe controlled by Murphy's Law, sometimes offset by Brewster's
Factor; that's engineering.
"Not one hundred percent efficient, of course...but nothing ever is."--Kirk, "Metamorphosis", stardate 3219.8
"I can't understand it. I can't even understand the people who can understand it."--Queen Juliana of the Netherlands
"The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the
engineer is nobody."--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Two groups of students-math and engineering majors-boarded a train
that was headed for a technical convention. Each of the math majors
had a ticket, but their engineering counterparts had only one ticket
between them.
"Death and taxes are unsolved engineering problems."--Romana Machado
Send comments to: dahlt@rpi.edu
The math majors were snickering at this when an engineering student
shouted, "Here comes the conductor!" With that, all the engineering
majors squeezed into a bathroom. The puzzled math majors watched as
the conductor collected their tickets, then knocked on the bathroom
door and said, "Ticket please." The conductor took the single ticket
that was passed under the door and left.
Not to be outdone, the math students boarded the returning train with
only one ticket, and again they laughed because this time their rivals
had no ticket at all.
When the engineering lookout yelled, "Conductor coming!" all the
engineers crowded into one bathroom, while the math majors piled into
another. Then, before the conductor entered the car, one of the
engineers came out of his bathroom and knocked on the math majors'
door.
"Ticket please," he said.--blatantly snarfed from Reader's
Digest