Jim Medding’s Blog

Having cleaned up a few messes myself during my career, I can really identify with this quote.

A lifetime in engineering gives you a very good antenna. It also cures people of any self belief they cannot be wrong. You clear up a lot of messes during a lifetime in engineering. I could be wrong on global warming – I know that – but the guys on the other side don’t believe they can ever be wrong.

David Holland in The Telegraph

There is no theorem that says the interesting things in the world are conserved, only the total of everything.

Richard Feynman, Cornell University lecture “The Conservation Principles” (#3), 1964

While reading one of the numerous Stephen Ambrose books I own, I found this quote from Major General Fox Conner who was Dwight Eisenhower’s mentor and supervisor in the Panama Canal Zone in the between-war years.

Always take your job seriously, never yourself.

Major General Fox Conner, from The Supreme Commander by Stephen Ambrose.

Wikipedia says this is unsourced, I find to too good to not use.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

Sir Winston Churchill

Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

John von Neumann

If you want to have credibility on race, you have to speak honestly in very situation.

Juan Williams on the 7/24 /2009 edition of Special Report

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Ben Franklin

The reason, it has been suggested, why India has become and remains the largest and only real democracy in the Third World is because of its citizens’ insatiable thirst for information.

John Keegan, Intelligence In War, 2002, page 17

The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.

Sir Winston Churchill

In my book Charles Krauthammer is a brilliant guy. This quote from his March 9th column reflects some of his exceptional insight.

Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.