These quotes are so good I wanted to include them all (more below)

" wrote:
Forgive me for replying to myself, but I wanted to add this from the
letters in the February "Yachting World".

"A chairman of the Scottish branch of the Institution of Structural
Engineers once famously defined engineering as: 'The art of modeling
materials we do not wholly understand, into shapes we cannot precisely
analyze so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess, in such a
way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our
ignorance.'"


cavelamb himself wrote:
Aircraft design is 90% educated guesses,
worked out to four decimal places.


"Roger Long" wrote:
Another quote from the infamous Roger Long"

"Good engineers understand that the numbers are only a guide to their
judgement. Bad engineers believe them absolutely."


"Roger Long" wrote:
Wow. I wish I had heard that in time to include that in the Titanic
programs

My quote was, "Any idiot can make things strong enough. Engineering is the
science of making them light enough to be affordable and functional in the
real world. The designers of that ship were under enormous pressure to use
the absolute minimum of steel they could get away with."


Engineering is also different from research. Engineers have to figure
out how to build something with the available standard practices of
the day; or provide a practical & workable innovation to standard
practice. It's very easy to say "why didn't you do it like
this" (pointing to some exotic & extreme method which may not even be
a success at the experimental stage).

An official panel of the Society on Naval Architects and Marine Engineers
recently sponsored a paper intended, I believe, to show that I was
completely wrong so as to preserve their standing as the adults and
professionals since I was getting my own TV show, two in fact. They claim
that the ship broke from the bottom up instead of the top down.

That's possible. Further down you say there is a lot of evidence it
didn't happen that way, I'm curious. Wasn't there a RINA paper some
years back on the same subject? Until 1985 the expert opinion was that
the Titanic didn't break in half at all.

I'm also curious if you've ever checked into the newsgroup
"alt.history.ocean-liners.titanic" which is a bit slow these days but
is still a major rivet-counter hangout.

DSK