Quotes – W1SEG Amateur Radio Station

When very good physicists are wrong, they are not wrong for silly reasons, they are wrong for good reasons, and we can learn a lot from their thinking.
—Barton Zwiebach

Hacks are the product of exploiting the gap in awareness between how the system is believed to function and how the system functions, in fact.
—Ed Snowden

Regardless of how much you plan, you have to be willing to accept the idea of failure.
—James Cameron

To be completely risk-averse is never to take off.
—James Lovell

There are a few interesting parallels between the sinking of the Titanic and the loss of the Columbia Space Shuttle and her crew. In both cases, there were unheeded warnings. In both cases, the warnings were dismissed, not out of negligence, but for reasons that made sense based on the experience and institutional memory at that moment.
—James Cameron

Fail well and fail fast and move on.
—Giovanni Traverso

In my experience, speed often correlates with excellence, because it forces pragmatic design choices and extrudes incompetence from the organization.
—Casey Handmer

Engineering is very different from science. We work around science.
—Aart de Geus

But it’s okay if you make mistakes and it’s okay if you fail. The next time you do it, maybe you won’t make the same mistake.
—Joe Johnston

No question is too big to ask.
—Mary-Claire King

If everybody whose experiments didn’t work, left science? There would be no one left.
—Allan Wilson

Our job today, is not to do better than they did at spaceflight, it’s to make it more affordable.
—Jeff Bezos

As the people here grow colder
I turn to my computer
And spend my evenings with it
Like a friend.
—Kate Bush

I didn’t move to Maine to do big things. I did big things because I moved to Maine.
—Bernard Langlais

Delay there must be, due to the virtually inevitable snags, for up to a point it is better to let the snags be there than to spend such time in design that there are none (how many decades would this course take?).
—Alan Turing

He is a genius, but one has to check his calculations before one can accept them.
—Gustav Kirchhoff, speaking about James Clerk Maxwell

It must be emphasized that the machine does not think for itself. It may exercise some degree of judgment and discrimination, but the situations in which these are required, the criteria to be applied, and the actions to be taken according to the criteria, have all to be forseen in the program of operating instructions furnished to the machine. Use of the machine is no substitute for thought on the basic organization of a computation, only for the labour of carrying out the details of the application of that thought.
—Douglas R. Hartree

When faced with a crisis, focus on one thing at a time.
—Charley Stevens

The group developing VM/370 Release 1 produced at least a thousand lines of code per person per month, to the astonishment of IBM’s auditors, and they managed to enjoy themselves while they were doing it.
—Melinda Varian

Text editors are like religions, except that people don’t have such strong feelings about their religions.
—Unknown

I wish to acknowledge the unknown designers of single-chip microcomputers. They were not bound by dogma and were able to understand the unique architectural needs of their products.
—Harvey Cragon

If somebody can show that we’re wrong, that would be great. If somebody can explain: “There is a way to make your design better,” this is a gift! I would be like, “Thank you for this great gift! Wow this is awesome!” The worst thing would be like, “We want to do a dumb design and stick with our dumb design.” That would be insane.
—Elon Musk

My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out resources in people that they didn’t know they had.
—Edwin Land, Forbes, 1 June 1975

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.
—John W. Tukey

There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified.

—Donald Knuth

I get what I call a minimum viable solution. I don’t really understand why it works, but somehow it works, so we’re going to use it, we’re going to monetize it, we’re going to make it work.
—Bill Gerstenmaier

If you keep things simple, you can build it faster.
—Phil Moorby

There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.
—Peter F. Drucker

Speed isn’t everything, but it’s kilometers ahead of whatever is in second place.
—Edward M. McCreight

Some mistakes will be made along the way. That’s good! Because at least some decisions are being made along the way. And we’ll find the mistakes, we’ll fix them.
—Steve Jobs

Science knows it doesn’t know everything; otherwise, it’d stop. But just because science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.
—Dara Ó Briain

When in doubt, use brute force.
—Ken Thompson, talking about coding

If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong.
—Norm Schyer

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
—Fred Brooks

Students will come to me, trying to decide to be an engineer or a scientist. And I say, “Do you like solutions, or do you like questions?” If you continuously ask questions, you are a scientist. If you are focused on always getting the solution, you are an engineer. The reality is you have to be both.
—Richard Binzel

The FCC has a few very good technical people, but they’re totally outnumbered by the lawyers.
—Paul Baran

The romance of science lies in its explorations. Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.
—Edwin Hubble

the sand remembers
once there was beach and sunshine
but chip is warm too
—Damon A. Koronakos and Brian Roberts

People have a great misconception in this way: they think the way you solve things is by electing the right people. It’s nice to elect the right people, but that isn’t the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.
—Milton Friedman

Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.
—Jeff Bezos

A critical part of our success is our willingness to fail in ways that won’t compromise the mission, as long as we are constantly learning from our failures.
—Jeff Dexter, SpaceX software team

I don’t know what kind of HDL most ASIC designers will use in the year 2010, but it will be called ‘Verilog’.
—Steve Golson, in 2002

Hey, I was right!
—Steve Golson, in 2020

Physics is easy, people are hard. And regulator people are the hard-est.
—Gwynne Shotwell

Understanding how to operate a complicated piece of machinery is not the same as understanding how a complicated piece of machinery operates.
—Lucas Page

If you have a feature on a chip, and it isn’t paying its way, you should throw it out.
—Gene Hill

In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

For design to be understood by everyone – which good design should strive to do – it should be as simple as possible.
—Dieter Rams

Put kindness first.
—Karen Pryor

I know you have different views, but we all love Texas.
—Patrice Pike, onstage at Saxon Pub in Austin

I’ve always thought the fact that Boggs was a ham radio operator was important. It had a great impact on the way the Ethernet was designed, because the Ethernet fundamentally doesn’t work reliably. It’s like citizens’ band radio, or any of the other kinds of radio communication, which are fundamentally not reliable in the way that we think of the telephone. Because you know it basically doesn’t work, you do all the defensive programming—the ‘say again, you were garbled’ protocols that were worked out for radio communication. And that makes the resulting network function extremely reliably.… I’ve often wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t had that background.
—Bert Sutherland, referring to David Boggs and the invention of Ethernet

Coaxial cable is nothing but captive ether.
—Chuck Thacker

Minimize functional interfaces between complex pieces of hardware.
—George M. Low

It was really phenomenal to see this computer become a medium that stimulated the formation of a human community.
—Robert Taylor

By taking away the easy parts of their task, automation can make the difficult parts of the human operator’s task more difficult.
—Lisanne Bainbridge

The right mindset for an engineer is to approach each problem as a puzzle, finding joy in the discovery of a solution. God bless them. For some of us non-engineers, a life of unending problems sounds pretty terrifying. Rocket science is not for us.
—Eric Berger

The civilization that we have is this very small candle in a vast darkness, and we must do everything possible to ensure that candle does not go out.
—Elon Musk

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
—Alan Turing

An engineer’s life consists of staring down one technical problem after another, fixing this or modifying that, in an interminable quest to make something work. Sometimes failure necessitates a wholesale redesign of a system. Then the whole process repeats itself: Design. Build. Test. Fix. Retest. Redesign. Retest. And so on. All in the hope that, one day, you will reach a point where everything, finally, more or less works.
—Eric Berger

A significant amount of time doing ham radio will be spent untying knots in ropes.
—Mark K1RX

It’s of no use whatsoever. This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right—we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there.
—Heinrich Hertz

I think mostly I tend to believe important things get done by small groups of people who all know all about the whole project. That is, in those days all the software people knew something about hardware, and all the hardware people programmed. It wasn’t a group of unconnected people. It was a set of people who all knew a lot about the whole project.
—Frank Heart, project manager for ARPAnet IMP

The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people.
—Kelly Johnson

Last week CDC had a press conference during which they officially announced their 6600 system. I understand that in the laboratory developing this system there are only 34 people, “including the janitor.” Of these, 14 are engineers and 4 are programmers, and only one person has a Ph.D.… Contrasting this modest effort with our own vast development activities, I fail to understand why we have lost our industry leadership position by letting someone else offer the world’s most powerful computer.
—T. J. Watson, Jr., CEO of IBM

It seems like Mr. Watson has answered his own question.
—Seymour Cray, CDC 6600 designer

A good rule for rocket experimenters to follow is this: always assume that it will explode.
—G. Edward Pendray, Astronautics, October 1937

Then they asked, then exactly what are you going to do? I had to answer, I don’t know, that is why it is research.
—Albert Szent-Györgyi

We believe that if you are not failing, you are not learning and improving the design.
—Kate Tice, SpaceX

Kelly Johnson and his team at Skunk Works designed and built the A-12 (SR-71 Blackbird precursor) in about 28 months with a crew of 25 engineers and fewer than 50 technicians, no computers, no analysis, just sliderules and nicotine. And they had to invent stealth tech, computerized celestial navigation, and titanium metallurgy at the same time.
—Casey Handmer

You have to have leadership. You have to be able to take risks. Being aware of quality is something they don’t teach you in business school.
—Norm Rasmussen

The essence of engineering is the art of the compromise. There is no great design without constraints, and successfully juggling those constraints against the absolute project goals is the engineering primary job.
—Bob Colwell

A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.
—Mr. Bernstein

You’ll have to learn the ways of the Morse, if you’re to come with me to Dayton.

The Morse is what gives a Ham his power. It’s an energy field created by turning a carrier on and off. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.

I have something here for you. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough, but your uncle wouldn’t allow it. He feared you might follow old dittybopper on some damn fool DXpedition like your father did. Your father’s Morse key. This is the tool of a ham radio operator. Not as clumsy or random as a microphone; an elegant device for a more civilized age.

For over a thousand generations, CW ops were the guardians of peace and justice in the Aether. Before the dark times… before No Code…

May the Morse be with you.

—u/dittybopper_05H

The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren’t there.
—Gordon Bell

If, as a scientist, I’m not wrong? I’m not being bold enough as a scientist.
—Jay Bhattacharya

The thing about physics? Doesn’t matter if you believe it! It works the same whether you believe it or not.
—Steve Golson

I think the saddest phrase I ever hear in a computer installation is that horrible one: “But we’ve always done it that way.” That’s a forbidden phrase in my office. To emphasize the fact I keep a clock which operates entirely counterclockwise.
—Grace Hopper

There is more to Maine than exists in the imagination.
—John McPhee

Whatever requirement or constraint you have, it must come with a name, not a department.
—Elon Musk

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own.
—The Prisoner

Only accurate rifles are interesting.
—Col. Townsend Whelen, USA (Ret’d)

Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer, is to optimize a thing that should not exist.
—Elon Musk

In the South, eating has little to do with hunger.
—Willie Traynor

I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
—Tony Hoare

Make your requirements less dumb. Your requirements are definitely dumb.
—Elon Musk

Devices can be made foolproof, but not damn-fool-proof.
—Henry Petroski

Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.
—Henry Petroski

I’ve come to accept that I will, over the course of my ham career, end up with a lot of antennæ.
—u/flwyd

The future should not simply be the past with fewer bugs.
—Robin Diane Goldstein

No such thing as enough guns, ma’am, I’ll beg your pardon for saying so.
—Bob Lee Swagger

I feel the same way about radios.
—Steve W1SEG

Failure is an option here. If things are not failing you are not innovating.
—Elon Musk

Information sort of wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable… On the other hand, information almost wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out, in many respects, is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.
—Stewart Brand

If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.
—William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

Strive for design simplicity. You never have to fix anything you leave out.
—Bill Lear

Not everything worth doing is worth doing well.
—Tom West