Quote of the Day
You can’t possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It’s a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we’ve been building them for 100 years, it’s very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works—it’s even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential.
—Freeman Dyson, in a Wired interview with Stewart Brand
A better example, I think, is zippers.
Drew
May 18, 2011 at 2:55 pm