Technology Axioms

Technology Axioms

• Never trust results you get on a Friday afternoon until you can repeat the results on a Monday morning¹.
• You can never tell which way the train went by looking at the track.
• Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
• An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
• Tell a man there are 300 billion stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure.
• All great discoveries are made by mistake.
• Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
• A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.
• A failure will not appear till a unit has passed final inspection.
• Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book.
• The primary function of the design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman.
• To spot the expert, pick the one who predicts the job will take the longest and cost the most.
• After all is said and done, a hell of a lot more is said than done.
• Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts which are unobtainable and three parts which are still under development.
• If mathematically you end up with the incorrect answer, try multiplying by the page number.
• Computers are unreliable, but humans are even more unreliable. Any system which depends on human reliability is unreliable.
• If you can't understand it, it is intuitively obvious.
• Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches.
• If it's not in the computer, it doesn't exist.
• When all else fails, read the instructions.
• If there is a possibility of several things going wrong the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.
• Everything that goes up must come down.
• Any instrument when dropped will roll into the least accessible corner.
• If you build a system that even a fool can use, then only a fool will want to use it.
• If it jams, try to force it. If it breaks, it probably needed to be replaced anyway.
• Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value.

1. Thanks to Michael M. for this one - 3/8/2010