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April 01, 2015

Irving Langmuir on the limits to planning

    Every once in a while somebody’s thinking nicely captures the uncertainty in planning that gets swept under the rug. Irving Langmuir did that.

    Stalin believes that everything can be planned. Marx believed that everything could be planned. That’s the trouble with all dictators. They think they can run the world by planning from above. What did Mussolini try to do? What did Hitler try to do? They had plans for conquering the world and they knew just how to do it. They failed. They failed for many reasons, but one of the reasons is that you can’t run things that way. And I think that no matter how far you go in dictatorship, no matter how far it may succeed, it will ultimately fail because of the impossibility of planning on a world-wide scale.

    (Quoted from page 283 of The Engineer and Management, by Harry Rubey. Lucas Brothers, 1953.)
    For a brief biography of Irving Langmuir, click here. For images of or relating Irving Langmuir, click here.

April 01, 2015 |

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Books by H. Charles Romesburg

  • H. Charles Romesburg: The Life of the Creative Spirit

    H. Charles Romesburg: The Life of the Creative Spirit
    Practically all of the quotations in this blog's posts are collected in "The Life of the Creative Spirit."

  • H. Charles Romesburg: How About It, Writer?

    H. Charles Romesburg: How About It, Writer?
    Based on a study of more than 12,000 essays from the very best literary magazines, this book provides writers with lists of thousands of classic forms of opening sentences, titles, transition sentences, ways of saying "for example," and ways of closing nonfiction pieces. When you are writing an essay and want a hint for a better or fresh way of saying what you mean, looking through the lists acts on the imagination, stimulating your creativity. From Lulu Press (ISBN 1-4116-2862-4, 194 pp., softback), it's $16.95 when ordered from Lulu.com/Romesburg , and $22.95 from bookstores. To view its cover, click on www.cnr.usu.edu/romesburg/how_about_it_writer.htm To view its title page, contents, and first two chapters, click on: www.cnr.usu.edu/romesburg/how_about_it_writer_preview.pdf

  • H Charles Romesburg: Best Research Practices

    H Charles Romesburg: Best Research Practices
    The Saunterer’s new book (2009), Best Research Practices explains how to plan and carry out reliable experiments, how to conceive and circumstantially support research hypotheses, how to test research hypotheses with the hypothetico-deductive method, how to discover cause and effect, and more. It’s based on his examination of 5,000 top scientific articles, studying the methods used to produce reliable knowledge. Preview it on-line by going to the following link: http://print.google.com/print?isbn=9780557017836

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