h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

John Silber, the late, mostly unlamented former president of Boston University, used to talk about the "tremble factor," a rule in ancient Rome which made architects stand under bridges they had designed. If the bridge was unsturdy, and fell, it would fall on the person who designed it.

Survival of the fittest engineers / architects. I've heard about that one.

The single most important goal of my job is to try and break stuff, so that it won't do that once in production. The joy of being a test engineer is that if it doesn't break, everybody is happy, and if it does, it is usually interesting to find out why. So there is no actual downside.

For some reason I got a case of 'Row, row, row your Botham' from that Ur-flat-Earther.

My late dad was a civil engineer. He was very careful not to design things that would fall down.

I kind of like the idea of being involved in what we called at uni 'destructive testing'. (It was our excuse for a lot of things, like 'I meant to do that.')