Grudging respect for industry

Riffing off this post on Jane Galt

Working in optics allows me to sit on the fence between engineering and science. In principal this sounds like you can reap the best of both worlds - In practice, you tend to look like the enemy to both camps.

Anyhoo, my definition of engineering is that it's science that works more than 1% of the time. Another name for this is fake science. Things are known, and you just need "Technical refinements" to build a product. But there are techinical refinements and there are technical refinement. Making something work half the time instead of 1% is generally easy. Making something work, say Toyota amount of time, is amazingly hard.