I'd rather play a tune on a horn, but I've always felt that I didn't want to train myself. Because when you get a train, you've got to have an engine and a caboose. I think it's better to train the caboose. You train yourself, you strain yourself.
The end of coal in Appalachia doesn't mean that America is running out of coal (there's plenty left in Wyoming). But it should end the fantasy that coal can be an engine of job creation - the big open pit mines in Wyoming employ a tiny fraction of th...
I remember that, one day, I was visiting one training center in the 1990s that was teaching people how to fix Volkswagen engines from the 1960s, which were no longer sold. So you were training people on a skill that had zero value. The reason is that...
No engineer can go upon a new work and not find something peculiar, that will demand his careful reflection, and the deliberate consideration of any advice that he may receive; and nothing so fully reveals his incapacity as a pretentious assumption o...
I emphasize teachers because they are largely left out of the debate. None of the bombastic reports that come from Washington and think tanks telling us what needs to be 'fixed' - I hate such a mechanistic word, as if our schools were automobile engi...
Sultan: Rolls-Royce Phantom two. 4.3 litre, 30 horsepower, six cylinder engine, with Stromberg downdraft carburetor, can go from zero to 100 kilometres an hour in 12.5 seconds. And I even like the color.
Borg Queen: [Data fires quantum torpedoes at Cochrane's ship and inexplicably misses his target, outraging the Borg Queen] DATA! Lieutenant Commander Data: Resistance is futile! [Smashes the warp coolant, flooding Engineering and destroying the Borg]
Engineers love to optimize problems. Now I optimize logistical problems. I ask: 'What's the goal? What are our constraints? What is the optimal, elegant way to get to that goal within those constraints?' I break it down in terms of a data funnel: 'Wh...
Bill Phillips was this nervous, chain-smoking student. He had signed up to be an engineer, he had gone away to fight in the Second World War, he had come back. He had switched to sociology because he wanted to understand how people could do these ter...
The arctic pavement turned into a whirlwind of viscous blood. The fiery shadows on the metropolitan walls blitzed him, avenging overachievers starved for vengeance. He fell into the abyss. His migraine made his head feel heavier than it was. Thoughts...
I could be listening to Painted Red weave the stories of the saints in her rich roomy voice, and beginning to see how all those stories were in some way one story: a simple story about being alive, and being a man; a story that, simple as it was, cou...
A brick could be used in the same manner as a magician’s hat could be used as a basketball. I’m not suggesting a brick replace a basketball, because that’d be silly. But not as silly as the idea of paying people millions of dollars to put a rub...
Human nature, at its best, had always been based on a deep heroic restlessness, on wanting something--something else, something more, whether it be true love or a glimpse just beyond the horizon. It was the promise of happiness, not the attainment of...
Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
Wrapping his arms around her waist, he kissed her cheek. She inhaled his masculine scent, he smelled of engine grease, citrus hand cleaner and man. She turned in his arms and laid her cheek over his beating heart, treasuring the haven of his embrace....
My high-performance hair is shaped like a sports car, and when I chug coffee it sounds like a jet engine. Women don’t find me attractive, but only because women don’t find me (I’m living off the grid).
There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in Steve," he said. " He was interested not just in engineering, but also the business aspects. I taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, "...
A baseball manager recognizes a nonphysical talent, hustle, as an essential gift of great players and great teams. It is the characteristic of running faster than necessary, moving sooner than necessary, trying harder than necessary. It is essential ...
The South: Three-wheeled Piggly Wiggly shopping carts, grease-caked engine blocks, baby strollers with shredded black hoods, Soviet rocket parts, human skulls on spikes and orange-eyed Rottweilers on heavy chains breathing fire...
How quick, brutal, and fragile is life. You are born, you live a few years in wild hope, then you are dragged back into the night. You might have breathed on a little longer, had you not dared think yourself a human creature instead of an engine of m...
I want students to engage the way a clutch on a car gets engaged: an engine can be running, making appropriate noises, burning fuel and creating exhaust fumes, but unless the clutch is engaged, nothing moves. It's all sound and smoke, and nobody gets...
