Measurement Tools Quotes

There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified. It is often a mistake to make a priori judgments about what parts of a program are really critical, since the universal experience of programmers who have been using measurement tools has been that their intuitive guesses fail.

Time is a measure of space, just as a range-finder is a measure of space, but measuring locks us into the place we measure.

No doubt, man will continue to weigh and to measure, watch himself grow, and his Universe around him and with him, according to the ever growing powers of his tools.

Maybe its time we get a toolbox that doesnt just count whats easily counted, the tangible in life, but actually counts what we most value, the things that are intangible.

What gets measured gets improved.

You can't control what you can't measure

There is no shortage of mechanisms by which to measure almost anything.

It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean.

Get digital scales because, for baking, balance scales just aren't accurate enough: it's all in the weighing up.

Because the results are expressed in numbers, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that the intelligence test is a measure like a foot ruler or a pair of scales. It is, of course, a quite different sort of measure. Intelligence is not an abstraction like length and weight; it is an exceedingly complicated notion - which nobody has yet succeeded in defining.

The normal metric of measuring progress has actually been the rate of growth, OK? It's not a wrong metric, but it's not a full metric.

Research is four things: brains with which to think, eyes with which to see, machines with which to measure and, fourth, money.

Always use liquid measuring cups to measure liquid and dry measuring cups to measure dry. Especially when measuring flour, accuracy is important, so using only dry measuring cups - or better yet, weighing on a scale - is key.

I would love an upgrade from the Nielsen box; it feels so antiquated to me.