January Books 16) To Engineer is Human
16) To Engineer is Human, by Henry Petroski (.co.uk, .com)
I remember at one heated political meeting, doing a post-mortem on a particularly disappointing set of election results, a relatively new recruit to the party stopped the show by declaring that, as an engineer, she had been taught that it was vitally important to learn from disaster by doing some serious failure analysis, and the party ought to do that too. Well, she was right, and she's now Deputy Leader of the party, and from what I hear has been able to put those words into action.
No doubt this was one of the books on the QUB engineering syllabus on the subject. Lots of interesting stuff about why mistakes happen - the Tacoma Narrows bridge, the Kansas City Hyatt Regency, etc. Unfortunately the style is a bit repetitive and some of the most interesting nuggets - about Nevil Shute, for instance, or the Crystal Palace - felt rather shoved in at the end. Anyway, thanks very much to
angeyja for sending it to me.
Top UnSuggestion for this book: The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides.
I remember at one heated political meeting, doing a post-mortem on a particularly disappointing set of election results, a relatively new recruit to the party stopped the show by declaring that, as an engineer, she had been taught that it was vitally important to learn from disaster by doing some serious failure analysis, and the party ought to do that too. Well, she was right, and she's now Deputy Leader of the party, and from what I hear has been able to put those words into action.
No doubt this was one of the books on the QUB engineering syllabus on the subject. Lots of interesting stuff about why mistakes happen - the Tacoma Narrows bridge, the Kansas City Hyatt Regency, etc. Unfortunately the style is a bit repetitive and some of the most interesting nuggets - about Nevil Shute, for instance, or the Crystal Palace - felt rather shoved in at the end. Anyway, thanks very much to
angeyja for sending it to me.
Top UnSuggestion for this book: The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides.