Sometime back in 2019 I made a post that I continually updated with quotes I came across that I liked or thought were interesting. As that post has become relatively long, I’ve decided to start a new thread here, of quotes I come across in 2021. New quotes can be found at the top. (Updated December 2021)
“Dealing with the pressure of several times the force of gravity pushing on my chest at liftoff, and keeping cool under the stress of landing on the moon with only a few gasps of fuel remaining in the tank was relatively easy compared to overcoming the enormous pressures and stresses that were unraveling in my life.”
“Why only two dimensions and why only flat plates? Simply because, as Denys later noted, it was 1975 and computers weren’t yet sufficiently powerful in storage and memory capacity to allow for three-dimensional designs, or rounded shapes, which demanded enormous numbers of additional calculations. The new generation of supercomputers, which can compute a billion bits of information in a second, is the reason why the B-2 bomber, with its rounded surfaces, was designed entirely by computer computations. Denys’s idea was to compute the radar cross section of an airplane by dividing it into a series of flat triangles. Each triangle had three separate points and required individual calculations for each point by utilizing Ufimtsev’s calculations. The result we called “faceting” - creating a three-dimensional airplane design out of a collection of flat sheets or panels, similar to cutting a diamond into sharp-edged slices.”
“One experienced lady, who had brought along blankets, a jug of coffee, a transistor radio and a pair of high-powered binoculars, was both excited and unworried. ‘There’ll come a time,’ she said, gazing out at the searchlights in the distance, ‘when space travel will be as common as jet planes are today.’”
“And we undoubtedly made some of the engineers a little sore at us sometimes with our bright ideas. But we figured that since we had to fly the capsule, it ought to be something that we wanted, not just something that satisfied the slide-rule pilots.”
“But space travel is not all moon and stars and distance planets. There are many unusual duties that need to be done before we can launch a man safely on such a trip.”
“Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he never wrong?”
“Don Griffin, a free soul if I ever knew one, then took a year’s vacation from rocket propulsion, spending it in the Hula-Hoop business. He said it made more sense.”
“The connection was so bad, I couldn’t talk at all during most of the call. How terrible it is when you say I love you and the person at the other end shouts back ‘What?’”
“‘Don’t you have a home to go to?’ I asked him. ‘Who looks after you? The pigeons in the park?’”
“Oh, God, if I’m anything by a clinical name, I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”
“‘I mean it,’ the Matron of Honor said. ‘You can’t just barge through life hurting people’s feelings whenever you like it.’”
“And there is one disconcerting thing about working with a computer — it’s likely to talk back to you. You make some tiny mistake in your FORTRAN language — putting a letter in the wrong column, day, or omitting a comma — and the 360 comes to a screeching halt and prints out rude remarks like ‘ILLEGAL FORMAT’, or ‘UNKNOWN PROBLEM’, or, if the man who wrote the program is really feeling nasty that morning, ‘WHAT’S THE MATTER STUPID? CAN’T YOU READ?’ Everyone who uses a computer frequently has had, from time to time, a mad desire to attach the precocious abacus with an axe.”
“‘(-bleep-) you, Stan’ I interrupted amiably. ‘If you think I’m going to tell my people to fire something without knowing what’s in it you’ve got rocks in the head.’”
“Say somebody dropped (accidentally or otherwise) a greasy wrench into 10,000 gallons of 90 percent peroxide in the hold of the ship. What would happen — and would the ship survive? This question so worried people that one functionary in the Rocket Branch (safely in Washington) who had apparently been reading Captain Horado Hornblower, wanted us at NARTS to build ourselves a 10,000 gallon tank, fill it up with 90 percent peroxide, and then drop into it — so help me God — one rat. (He didn’t specify the sex of the rat). It was with considerable difficulty that our chief managed to get him to scale his order down to one test tube of peroxide and one quarter inch of rat tail.”
“The separation of technology and art is both unnecessary and incorrect; one is not an enemy of the other. Instead it is essential to understand that technology is often a necessary component of art and that art helps technology to serve man better.”
“People will do anything to survive, even become better.”
“‘Did you like it?’ he mimicked. ‘I loved it. I just adore airplanes. They’re so cute.’”
“Lew doesn’t remember the name of it, but it’s the most beautifully written book he’s ever read. Christ! He isn’t even honest enough to come right out and say he liked it because it was about four guys that starved to death in an igloo or something. He has to say it was beautifully written.”
“But listen: I want you to have some idea of your potential. It is great. Like me, when you’re good (as a person, versatilely), you’re very very good, and when you’re bad, you need rehabilitation; ergo: we both have a great deal of growing (maturing) to do, and it is by our relationships with other people (after all, what is life but people) that we will grow to ripe stature. In other words, the self-examinations that are induced by our problems and disappointments in relation to others are paradoxically the best incentives to growth and change we have. And it does take guts to grow and change, especially when your horizon is lighted up by what looks like the very best of good things. . .”
“Loading new software into new computers and using it for the first time was like playing Russian roulette. It demanded and got a lot of respect.”
“Failure was an option at SpaceX, partly because the boss often asked the impossible of his team. In meetings, Musk might ask his engineers to do something that, on the face of it, seemed absurd. When they protested that is was impossible, Musk would respond with a question designed to open their minds to the problem, and potential solutions. He would ask, ‘What would it take?’”
“The problem of how to rigorously define the volume of V has to be faced, and we shall solve it in Section 5.2 by the classic method of exhaustion, or rather, in more modern terms, the method of Riemann sums.”
“I saw there, in the midst of this fire that burns not, the swift and elegant porpoise (the indefatigable clown of the ocean), and some sword-fish ten feet long, those prophetic heralds of the hurricane, whose formidable sword would not and then strike the glass of the saloon.”
“Friend Conseil, I like you very much, but not enough to eat you unnecessarily.”
“Screws provide such a powerful description that a great deal of the kinematics literature is phrased in the language of screw theory, providing an endless source of titillating puns.”
“What kind of theory should we be attempting to build? Will there be a neat solution — some simple idea that will allow us to build robots with human-like abilities? Comparison with related engineering disciplines suggests otherwise. Nobody expects a single neat theory for the problem of building a car or a rocket. Artifacts of great complexity depend on a large diverse collection of scientific and engineering results, and a robot competitive with a human being will surely be more complex than anything we have constructed before.”