While the saying “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” may be popular among those who skirt tragedy through life, it is not an attitude we can adopt as engineers.
Most of us have probably experienced the exercise known as “value engineering,” the process where everyone on the team looks at a design and tries to find ways to save some money.
Recently, I had the opportunity to go on a fishing trip. It was a “deep-sea” excursion from the northern tip of Plum Island in New England. The recommended method of trickery was to put some pieces of squid on a hook, weight the line with a 16-ounce hunk of lead and let it sink to the bottom of the ocean.