Engineering Quote of the Week - Gustave Eiffel

The first principle of architectural beauty is that the essential lines of a construction be determined by a perfect appropriateness to its use.
                                                                                                                       ~Gustave Eiffel

(Quoted in J. Harriss, The Tallest Tower: Eiffel and the Belle Epoque (1975), 20. Cited by David P. Billington, 'Bridges and the New Art of Structural Engineering,' in National Research Council (U.S.). Transportation Research Board Subcommittee on Bridge Aesthetics, Bridge Aesthetics Around the World (1991), 67.)

Chicken Science - Cartoon Thursday

Scientists answer the age-old question, "Why did the chicken cross the road?"

(I found so many of these chicken one-liners on the internet, I think I will make several cartoons about the old chicken joke.  I couldn't find a specific person to attribute the verbiage.)

Engineering Quote of the Week - Yuan Cheng ("Bert") Fung

Engineering is quite different from science. Scientists try to understand nature. Engineers try to make things that do not exist in nature. Engineers stress invention. To embody an invention the engineer must put his idea in concrete terms, and design something that people can use. That something can be a device, a gadget, a material, a method, a computing program, an innovative experiment, a new solution to a problem, or an improvement on what is existing. Since a design has to be concrete, it must have its geometry, dimensions, and characteristic numbers. Almost all engineers working on new designs find that they do not have all the needed information. Most often, they are limited by insufficient scientific knowledge. Thus they study mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and mechanics. Often they have to add to the sciences relevant to their profession. Thus engineering sciences are born.
                                                                                       ~Yuan-Cheng ("Bert") Fung

(Y.C. Fung and P. Tong, Classical and Computational Solid Mechanics (2001), 1.)

Real Engineers - Cartoon Thursday

How do you tell if you are hanging out with a real engineer?

Engineering Quote of the Week - Richard Hamming

"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.
Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state."
                                                                                  ~Richard Hamming

(In The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1975, 2005), 5.)

Image: Color of each pixel is Hamming distance between the binary representations of its x and y coordinates, modulo 16, in the 16-color system.

Yesterday, An Engineer's Lament - Cartoon Thursday

The song every engineer gets to sing once in a while.

(Lyrics found at Materials Modification, Inc.)

Engineering Quote of the Week - Henry Petroski

"Engineers … are not superhuman. They make mistakes in their assumptions, in their calculations, in their conclusions. That they make mistakes is forgivable; that they catch them is imperative. Thus it is the essence of modern engineering not only to be able to check one’s own work but also to have one’s work checked and to be able to check the work of others."

~Henry Petroski