Slashdot Mirror
The Origin of Murphy's Law
LauraW writes "HotAIR, the web site of the Annals of Improbable Research , is publishing a fascinating series on the Origin of Murphy's Law. It turns out there really was a Murphy, and the story of his law involves rocket sleds, Chuck Yeager, and Edwards Air Force Base. The article covers all these topics and more, and includes interviews with Yeager, the son of Murphy (really), and several surviving members of the project that inspired the law."
Murphy was an optimist.
is also known as Sod's law in the UK
Perhaps it was more like the ones that didn't survive inspired the law in those that did! What a crazy story!
stuff |
Thereby proving the law!
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
"Bad people are punished by societies laws and good people are punished by Murphy's Law." --George, Dead Like Me
If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee -- that will do them in.
Suncoast Linux - Sarasota, FL
So there you have it. Truth according to the Internet. :)
If a server can be slashdotted, it definetly will be.
What does sod mean in the dirst place? I have heard it in songs etc from UK bands but just assumed they had a passion for lawn care,
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Just curious.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
I don't believe processor speeds double every 18 months. I upgraded in 2000 to an P3 800 Mhz, and now I bought a AMP Athlon 2400 which only runs at 2.03MHz. Bogus I say.
Anyone who has read through the original "Murphy's Law" books, published in the late 70s / early 80s, should remember that this was well documented in the prefaces. This is hardly new information. Come to think of it, it's not really "science" either, as suggested by the category.
I read it on Slashdot!
See the second definition.
"Anytime a camera is present, someone will stretch open their bottom."
Trolling is a art,
Initially, it was "if the damn idiot can get it wrong, he will", which was an indictment of poor design assuming that the user was smart, when we all know that a smart design assumes the user is stoned and half-asleep on a muggy Monday morning.
The victims of Murphy's Law then turned around and said "if the system can go wrong, it will", which was around the same period we invented the notion of "computer error".
Finally, Murphy's Law made the leap to non-technological domains, "if something can break, it will, in the worst possible way".
So Murphy's Law today delegates responsibility for our fuck-ups to the hostile hand of fate, whereas Murphy's original comment was all about our own responsibility for making systems that actually work.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Murphy's law originally stated that if something can go wrong, at some point it will, therefore make it such that the somthing can't go wrong. In other words, idiot-proofing is required when building something.
For example, PS2 connections for keyboards and mice are keyed to prevent being plugged in the wrong way.
GUI developers (especially KDE and GNOME developers!!!) should take notes on things like this.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Mirror here.
According to this page, sod's law was the original name for "if anything can go wrong it will" and has been around for much longer than "Murphy's Law". The 'sod' simply refers to an arbitrary unfortunate individual..
"Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong"
:-)
including for Mr. Murphy himself, who most likely has been trying to stay very low profile for decades, and who now sees his hopes of finally not being associated with this calamitous law utterly vanish with a single Slashdot article.
Hi Ed
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Noun. 1. A contemptible or objectionable person.
2. A pitiable person. E.g."He's just had his car stolen and his wife has just run off with the milkman, the poor sod." This use is also be found with the expressions 'poor bastard' and 'poor bugger'.
* Abb. of the word sodomite.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Donath's Observation: Murphy was misquoted.
(Murphy actually said "If there's any way they can do it wrong, they will." They even quoted him wrong.)
Mild form of abuse, suggesting the sod is cruel or heartless, milder than "bastard".
According to the h2g2 swearing page...
The famous and probably apocryphal epitaph says, 'Under this sod, lies another'. Sod means turf, but here is an abbreviation for 'Sodomite'.
Just a thought: we can all post our corallaries all over the place, or we can put them together. I say, 3/4 of you post your corallaries here, and the other 1/4, make some more top-level posts reasonably identical to mine!
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
...it will be misspelled.
--Slashdot editor's law
It's short for sodomy.
up ^
Then, to make things doubly clear, put another identifier near the bottom, with its own arrow:
dn v
That way, with up saying up, and dn for down, the UPS (pronounced oops) guys can't get it wrong.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
With a 2 sec google search:
Murphy's Law
If I remember correctly, there is even a picture of the guy in question, and some pretty funny story to in the "Origin of Murphy's Law" section...
I'd rather be sailing...
Reverse Murphy's Law:
"Things never go as bad as they could have."
A teacher one introduced me to it for fun, but I think it holds.
"If it can go wrong, it will": site is now slashdotted.
We are all individuals!
...that says Ellen Muth has to get nude (hot grits scene optional) in an upcoming episode. Who's with me??
you wil never read this post... /.
so much can go wrong when posting to
I want my karma, and I want it now!
The moderators are on crack. To understand this joke, take a good look at the parent post and turn your monitor upside down, or go stand on your head. And yeah, it pretty much murphy-related.
Slashdot finally achieves total irrelevancy...
I was expecting a scientific explanation for Murphy's Law. You know, like conservation laws for energy and momentum are explained from the symmetry of spacetime. If we maintain that Murphy's is a law of physics, there must be a *&^[#%&]$^#%{[[::@;' NO CARRIER
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
"Everything You Know About Murphy's Law is Wrong"
fsck, Murphy did it again.
I have become the world's leading expert on Murphy's Law. No really, I'm serious. You doubtless have heard the Law: Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. To some it is a profound statement of philosophy, a reminder that life can be defined just as much by its inherent challenges as anything else. To others however the Law is a pessimistic comment that underscores, albeit in more elegant terms, that shit happens.
Whatever you might think about Murphy's Law, one thing is certain: it is as ubiquitous an expression as there is in American English. Over the years it has been cited in thousands of articles, websites and news reports, been the subject of several books, appeared as the title of at least one bad Charles Bronson movie and a TV show, and inspired about a dozen zillion corollary Laws. Just about every time something goes wrong somewhere, the Law gets its two cents in. Fortunately my expertise owes very little to actual adversity -- I'm not writing this from a hospital bed -- and almost everything to research. Historical research. Which is to say I have become the expert on the origins of Murphy's Law. This happened by accident...and if I'd known what the consequences would be of sticking my nose into it -- how I'd draw the wrath of Chuck Yeager, get caught in the middle of a nasty 20-year feud, and nearly wind up in a hospital bed -- I probably wouldn't have bothered.
The Road to Murphy's Law
This all began a few months ago, after I showed an article I'd written for an aviation history magazine to my neighbor. The article concerned some goings on at Edwards, the famed Air Force flight test facility, in the 1950's. "You know," my neighbor said, "You'd probably be real interested in talking to my father, David Hill Sr. He worked at Edwards, on a bunch of rocket sled tests in the 1940's. In fact," he continued proudly, "he knew Murphy."
"Murphy?" I inquired, searching my memory for a test pilot of the same name. Yeager, Crossfield, Armstrong... It didn't ring a bell.
"You know, Murphy," he went on. "The guy who invented Murphy's Law."
I didn't say it, but I was absolutely skeptical. Who wouldn't be? One might as well claim to be friends with Kilroy, know the identity of Deepthroat, or the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart. The notion seemed outright laughable. Your father knew Murphy? Sure he did! If Murphy wasn't some imaginary Irish folk hero, then he was probably a gentle sage who drank a lot of Guinness and lived back in the 1700's. Needless to say I let the subject slide.
But a day or two later, I almost tripped over a slender book called Murphy's Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong that had been left on my doorstep. The book cited Murphy's Law and then listed literally hundreds of amusing corollaries. The extremely brief forward to the volume included a letter written by an engineer named George Nichols. And this is where things got interesting. Nichols said he'd worked on a series of rocket sled tests at Edwards in the 1940's with a Colonel John Paul Stapp and that Murphy's Law emerged from these tests.
"The Law's namesake," Nichols wrote, "was Capt. Ed Murphy Jr., a development engineer... Frustrated with a strap transducer which was malfunctioning due to an error in wiring the strain gauge bridges caused him to remark -- 'if there is any way to do it wrong, he will' -- referring to the technician who had wired the bridges. I assigned Murphy's Law to the statement and the associated variations..."
That appeared straightforward enough, and piqued my interest. I subsequently did some research and I discovered to my surprise that the story of the origin of Murphy's Law was not something generally agreed upon. Accounts in fact varied wildly. Some sources gave the credit solely to Ed Murphy Jr., a man they praised for his wisdom, insight, and panache, but said almost nothing about. In other places, Nichols' letter appeared -- often word for word -- explaining how he had come up with "the statement." And at least a few writers suggested that Co
http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/m/Murphy_s_La w.html
According to FOLDOC, Murphy's Law is:
If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it.
The FOLDOC entry (from the Hacker's Lexicon I believe) also mentions the rocket sled thing....
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
anything that can be slashdotted, has been slashdotted... all those mirrors are FUBAR, i'd hate to be the sysadmin of the main site right now.
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
I couldn't connect the site (slashdotted),
but every geek out there knew the story for at least 20 years.
Just google it (hint: adding finagle or niven might help) and you get dozens of pages explaining it.
Nothing special. Just someone being smart in bringing his server down....
On the other side of the screen it all looked so easy.
(Bemoaning our organization's hardware department):
"Those assholes won't do a job unless they can fuck it up first."
I'm not so sure that the standard version of Murphy's Law really delegates our fuck-ups to the hostile hand of fate. I've always thought of it as a reminder of just how much attention it takes to succeed in our responsibility to make systems work properly.
A program, for example, should be able to handle every possible strange situation or user input that can be thrown at it, even the ones the programmer would never have expected, and at least be able to generate an error and stop executing rather than exhibiting unexpected behavior. The responsibility is entirely on the programming team - nobody's going to cut them any slack if that ICBM launch detecting system sets off all the alarms because it thought a DC-10 with all four engines burning was really a missile launch.
Murphy's law
alt.binaries.erotica.hamster.ducktape
His "If it can go wrong," part of the clause is akin to Einstein's "fix factor." The truth is, it just will god wrong, regardless.
Where did you get your dictionary from?
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I guess this could be considered "news for newbies" because this has been in the jargon file for quite some time.
That's ok, you go read it guys. I'll just sit back sipping my ISO standard cup of tea and enjoying some ANSI standard pizza.
Be sure to submit a story when you find out why it's called El Camino Bignum.
Mother nature sides with the hidden.
If it's flaws you're hiding,
That's where nature's siding.
I've always thought that "Murphy's law" was not precise enough. There's this addition that is needed to make it really work.
:D
Murphy's law revised:
"If anything can go wrong, it will. At the worst possible moment."
Try that one on for size. Proof? Two examples.
When a wing on an aircraft fails, not too many people will notice, unless the aircraft is flying.
You don't mind getting butter on your suit too badly, except when it's your new suit, that you just bought yesterday for this really important job-interview you're due for in about an hour.
I could go on for hours.
Karma? What's that again?
Has nothing to do with computers, but I read it on a Murphy's Law poster once: "Celibacy is hereditary." That just killed me.
Can somebody summarize this article with a bias towards Java and Sun so I can understand it?
In the famous Meyer Brigg's [spelling?] personality test Murphy's law is commonly associated with the "J" type personality.
J is for judgemental; it is the 50% of people who like to be well organized and plan things in advance.
Murphy's law basically says that you should always do more preparations and planning to be better prepared; it thus rings very well with this group.
The other half of the population are much more interested in living in the present, for them the idea of always doing more preparations and planning for the future is not so appealing at all.
Tor
A story (don't know the origin) involves a thirsty emperor arriving at a bar and ordering a pint of mead (old times, you know). When the waitress arrives she holds the pint by the ear so that the emperor cannot grab it easily.
The mead must have tasted well enough for him to return to the bar with a built-to-order pint with two opposite handles. Sure enough the waitress returns the full pint to the emperor holding the pint with both hands by both handles.
Third time's a charm, the emperor must have thought as het returned to the bar, this time with a pint having three handles. Unimpressed the waitress returns the full pint holding it by two handles with the third handle pointing towards her chest.
Moral: idiot-proof design is difficult, and requires many iterations.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
So murphy's law *IS* rocket science.
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
This story is begging for elitist revisionism. Where is snopes.com in all of this!? Oh, wait, slapping an urban legend tag on this story wouldn't further a particular political agenda.
Nothing else going on in the world?
Time to create a new poll?
-- No sig for you!
If anything that can go wrong does go wrong, this may be due to chance. It seems unlikely, though, given the usual outcome of our feeble attempts to improve the world. Straight odds could not leave the world as buggered up as it is. The other possiblility is that another force, or 'supreme being' is at work, interfering with our honest efforts. I suspect this is the case, because Murphy's law (or Sod's law) is a _REAL_ thing; of that I am certain.
I stole this
I've interpreted this incident as follows: (dunno if it really has anything to do with whatever Murphy was thinking)
Given n independent probabilities, the likelyhood that they all happen at the same time isn't what you'd mathematically come up with.
How on earth is this possible?
Simple, chances are that they aren't independent after all. This probability may seem diminishingly small and thus it is often ignored, but it comes into play when the former product results into something even smaller.
You might have seen a house fly. You may even have seen a super fly - but you ain't never, ever, seen a donkey fly!
That would explain brutha numsei in the golden child, i reckon.. Didn't know he was in the air force. Perhaps he invented flubber and robin william's is just covering for him..
A friend of mine forumulated the following:
Downey's Constant: Things will tend to go wrong in a fashion most pleasing to a malevolent deity.
Burrough's Corollary: The malevolent deity acts to conceal its existence.
Therefore: The more certain you are of the Constant, the less subtle the deity in its manipulations.
Somehow I read "Annals of Improbable Research" as 'anal probe research'.
"Once in, he can't be dismissed. And, if he chooses, he may ignore his training and education, often to the detriment of the people"
a geek would come and rm -r the bastard luser...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Looks like the site has been slashdotted. Though at least two of the pages are cached on Google:
The Fastest Man on Earth (Overview and Index)
The Fastest Man on Earth (Part 2 of 4)
Blackadder: "First Name?"
Baldrick: "I'm not sure."
Blackadder: "Come on, you MUST have a first name."
Baldrick: "It might be Sod Off."
Blackadder: "Sod Off??"
Baldrick: "Yeah, when I was a young lad playing in the gutter, I used to say to all the other snipes, "Hello, my names Baldrick". And they'd say, "Yes we know, Sod Off Baldrick"
Suck figs.
I'm not!
You see, without that little doohicky, the universe stops.
http://propheteer.org
Wrong. From Dictionary.com:
So the usage relating to earth has a distinct derivation from the usage as a term of abuse, which is indeed short for sodomite.
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
I've actually heard another version of the Original Myrphy's law... "If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way". The reference is here.
Does anyone know the validity of this version?
.: Max Romantschuk
Q: How do you split the atom?
A: Send it through the post marked 'fragile'
If you post it on your web site, it's available even if you don't directly link to it.
Part 4 early for your viewing pleasure.
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
Murphy's Law is one of the pillars of the entire Open Source idea. Send your code to the world. Someone, somewhere will screw something up, often with amusing or frightful consequences. Something will go wrong.
The problem with traditional methods of testing is that these worst cases -- the outlier condition, the far-fetched and novel usage -- are not even considered let alone tested. You can make default conditions for wildcard input, but cannot test for what you cannot conceive. So Murphy's Law is actually a good thing.
Murphy's law was not created Murphy, but by another man with the same name.
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
Murphy's Law wasn't written by Murphy, but by another man with the same name.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
first, the reason nothing can be made truly idiot-proof is that no rational human being can guess all of the variations that an idiot is going to somehow come up with. And the idiot in question isn't going to be coherent enough to tell you, either. (No matter how well it's designed, there are always going to be those individuals who could be left in a padded room with two steel ball bearings- and in ten minutes, will have lost one and broken the other... and they're going to want to use your design, too)
the second one that we talk about where i work is that for design purposes, you have to think about how bright the 'average' guy is... and then realise that, by definition, likely half of them are going to be dumber than that!
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
Two memorable Corollary laws that I remember from a Murphy's Law calendar I once had:
-- Where there's a right, there's a wrong.
-- A fool and your money are soon partners.
Fantastic write-up that geeks need to read. Insight on history, human nature, science, and safety.
For every poster who wrote "I've heard this before!" read the article and you will see that the author compares the different versions of the origin.
p.s. congrats on slashdotting improb.com. They run the Ignoble prizes, and publish "The Annals of Improbable Research" A great blend of science and humo[u]r.
mks
Presumably says that not only will things go wrong if they can, but the rate of their going wrong is doubling every 18 months. Which explains a lot...
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
The article indicates (from one account, mind you) that murphy kicked out a shorter version - "If anything can go wrong, he'll do it." or possibly "If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will." Both of them have the same spirit as the foldoc entry, but are referring to a single individual, not making a general statement about life.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If there are 5 checkout lanes open in a grocery store, only one of them will be the fastest. So, 4 times out of 5, the lane you pick will be slower than another lane.
Murphy's Law is all about perception.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
The whole point of the article is a fact so well known that it's included in the jargon file. What's next an article describing the meaningAunt Tillie?
...basically, "go f--- yourself in the @$$", in its most derogatory form.
... you just have to follow a simple pattern:v 9i5/murphy/murphy4.html
http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume9/
Enjoy!
"Guys become, if you'll pardon my expression, sexual intellectuals. You know what the phrase is for that?"
I have to admit no, I'm not familiar with the term. Sexual what?
"Sexual intellectuals. They're fucking know-it-alls, that's what."
i shot my Dr. Pepper out my nose reading that.
every - and i do mean EVERY single person i've met that's ever seen or dealt with Chuck Yeager (given General for the hell of it) has used the word "asshole" to describe him.
(i'm former AF officer and have dealt with enough guys at Edwards to have been able to "trend" this)
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
...Slashdot mods have no life other than video games and jacking eachother off...
Heh. The brittish like their anal sex, or at the very least accusing people of it. Sod off, has a cousin buggeroff. Bugger being the act of anal sex. Other variations that have carried over to Australian English include bugger me (used comically in a recent car ad, everytime something goes wrong, which it does around this type of car, the character says, Bugger ME!), go to buggery, and probably others I can't think of.
Not to mention all the variations of names used to call homosexuals.
BTW, the 4th page of this article is already available. Just substitute page no. in the url to 4 and there you go. No need to wait 2 days for the final installment.
Site's slow, so here is a website about the origins of Murphy's Laws:
Origin of Murphy's Law
My question is, what self-respecting Slashdot reading nerd here wouldn't already know the story about Murphy's Law?
Just wondering --since I think it's stuff that matters
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
About 15 years ago a computer systems professional wrote an article which was published in Network World magazine that discussed Murphy's Law. The basic premise was that Murphy's Law was a crutch used by incompetants to justify they're lack of planning. The ideas expressed by Murphy should be a warning to all to prepare for the worst you can imagine so your not caught by the small shortcomings; however, they are all too often used to justify the failure of someone to plan. A disaster does not have to be a catastrophe if proper planning is done.
I'm providing the text of the article below. It is used by permission of the author.
Brandt's Laws
It was 1959. I was sixteen years old and had just accepted a job with a small electronics firm. I was employed there but a few days when I learned of Murphy's Law. I had previously learned of Charles' and Boyle's laws and the law of gravity. I instinctively knew if they called it a law, Murphy was right. After all, the other laws I had learned were valid.
I spent four years in electronics and moved to Data Processing after college. From what people said, Murphy seemed to be alive and well in the computer industry too. Something bothered me from time to time. People who had not been prudent used Murphy to avoid facing up to their failures. After all, if something was going to happen no matter what you did, how could you be held responsible for it? Carelessness crept in when Murphy could be blamed.
In the early eighties, I was introduced to men like Ken Copeland, Phil Crosby, Edward Demming and Ken Hagin. They all teach that we are responsible for our actions and we control our futures.
It took time but their message finally started to sink in. If I was prudent, I could control many of the things I had considered beyond my control. If I didn't accept unfavorable results as inevitable, they were not. Slowly, I formulated what is nearly the antithesis of Murphy's law. Although I didn't invent these laws, since I recorded them I don't blanch at calling them Brandt's Laws. Like anyone who is ahead of his peers, I've even been criticized for them. The following are several of the basic ones.
Too often, things happen and we simply write them off as inevitable. All too frequently, these are the result of a lack of prudence, fueled by carelessness caused by Murphy's laws.
I have never seen a well-planned fiasco.
By carefully studying the situation and engaging in good contingency planning, your survival is assured.
Lack of academic preparation and carelessness in on-going study frequently cause failures. I've seen many so-called professionals who don't study enough to keep up with even a minimum of available knowledge. Many work harder at their hobbies than their professions. These are not professionals but overpaid day laborers.
So frequently a band-aid is used to treat a severed artery, assuming or hoping it will heal if ignored. This is not to say that there frequently isn't a "simple" fix, but it should correct the problem and not create future problems. A quick fix targets symptoms, not the cause.
If, on the surface a problem has one obvious cause, there are several others and the most significant is not the obvious. The most obvious cause is frequently the one attacked, often at the expense of ignoring the real cause.
We're doomed.
Best Slashdot Co
I have to admit no, I'm not familiar with the term. Sexual what? "Sexual intellectuals. They're fucking know-it-alls, that's what."
That destroys the credibility of the piece for me. I swear I've seen stuff on TV where Chuck himself admits to having cracked ribs. But as he would point out, that's just the way I remember it.
You mean:
up ^
v dn
is also known as Silverman's Paradox:
"If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will."
This is the only possible explanation of why things sometimes go right.
Someone you trust is one of us.
... anyone which reads the Jargon File has known this for a decade, and anyone which reads Niven knows that Finagle got Finagled.
</insidejoke>
StoneCypher is Full of BS
As my EE professor exclaimed when I let the magic smoke out of a microprocessor (the EPROM version of the 8047, back in '83 when they were rather expensive): "another example of Finnegans' Law - anything can be a fuse."
The laws themselves are fine as far as they go, and I've heard many of them before, but the original author's fatal flaw lies in the fact that he, and many others, mistake Murphy's Law for a physical law, like gravity. Murphy's Law, as we know it today (anything that can go wrong, will) is fundamentally a law of humanity, and our propensity for planning and design in general.
Nature doesn't "go wrong". An asteroid hitting the Earth and wiping out life may seem like a fine example of Murphy's Law, but only to those entities capable of making plans and designing things. Earth didn't plan to let dinosaurs evolve into a higher form of life, and have it's plans marred by that meddling asteroid hitting around the Yucatan. Nothing went wrong, on any kind of cosmic scale, though I imagine any dinosaurs capable of thought at the time might have come up with a simillar law, as their plans for dinner, having some offspring, and maybe surviving another few years, or even a few minutes, were pretty much ended right quick.
Bad things are only inevitable if you assume that good things are inevitable. That's Murphy's Law reworded, and it is the fundamental basis for Brandt's Laws. I think the original author missed the point.
I always thought that the term Murphy's Law came from the many trials and tribulations of the famous war hero: Audie Murphy.
http://www.grunts.net/legends/audiemurphy.html
Nowadays it's been pretty much cleared up. But in times between 286 and early P2, there were two basic methods as how to "protect" the ide tapes from plugging them in the wrong way. One was a bit of plastic sticking out from the side, the other was one of the holes in the plug filled. One was solved by corresponding gap in the plastic around the pins, the other by a missing pin. The problem though, was that apparently the producers couldn't come to agreement which one is right. So sometimes there was no gap, sometimes there were all the pins, so sometimes you checked 4 different IDE cables and you found none of them fits particular drive or motherboard. And finally, when you did and wanted to follow the "Red line to pin 1" ultimate rule, you found out that nobody took care to mark "1" on the motherboard and you had to look at other devices to recall "where the "1" is?"
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
What does sod mean in the dirst place?
Stormtroopers of Death. Sargent D is coming, and you're on his list.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Take a look at the urls for the first 3 pages and use your imagination. :)
The Voice of Murphy
Despite how badly my interview with Yeager concluded, I feel strangely relieved. I don't feel nearly so bad that...
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Murphys law was known and often quoted well
before the Civil War. So this Idea that it is somehow involved with rocket sleds and Yeager is
nonsense.
Narrator: There's always that.
Check URL http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume9/v 9i5/murphy/murphy4.html . They just don't have a link yet.
Text:
The Voice of Murphy
Despite how badly my interview with Yeager concluded, I feel strangely relieved. I don't feel nearly so bad that I?ve failed to find a definitive answer about the origins of Murphy's Law. Yeager's right: there is no definitive truth. History, as the old saying goes, is nothing more than a pack of lies that everyone agrees are true.
The second thing that transpired was that I unexpectedly received several emails from Robert Murphy. In one he wrote that he wanted to clarify that his father passed away in 1990, not 1989 as he'd written in his letter to the editor. In another he wrote that he'd found a note on Los Angeles West Point Society stationery asking ?if they could make a plaque about Murphy?s Law for possible submission to the Academy. In other words,? he continued, ?this was not something my father was campaigning for. As I told you, self promotion was completely foreign to my Father?? In the same email Robert cited the comments I made at our meeting and noted that in his view ?George Nichols is just an angry old man who regrets that the Law was not named after him, nothing more. He is a self-tainted source.?
And then Robert wrote an email containing some exciting news. He?d been going through some things ? I?d asked him to please find a photo of his father ? and he?d come across a cassette tape of a radio interview about the Law. He presents it, and a photo of his father working on some rocket sled components, to me at a subsequent meeting.
The cassette tape is unmarked, and there is no spoken introduction whatsoever on the recording. I guess it might be the CBC, or NPR, and probably dates from the time of the People article, early 1980?s. It?s as close as I?m going to get to interviewing Ed Murphy, and of course I can?t wait to hear it.
?Yes, Virginia,? says the nameless commentator broadly, ?there really is a Murphy. Ed Murphy, who we?ve got on the phone today...?
Ed Murphy?s voice is serious, deliberate and humorless. Absolutely appropriate, I decide, for a career engineer. Asked to tell his version of the Murphy?s Law story he goes into the kind of excruciating detail you?d expect from someone obsessed with precision. It leaves the interviewer, who apparently believed he was going to interview a slick, witty personality, completely flummoxed.
The senior Murphy said clearly in the interview that, as Nichols and Hill claimed, he wasn?t part of the Gee Whiz team. He?d only been to Edwards once during Stapp?s tests. He was working at Wright Field he recalled, on a project similar to Stapp?s but which involved the use of a centrifuge. He?d designed some innovative electronic measuring equipment for the centrifuge, and when John Stapp heard about that, he called and asked if Murphy?d design some similar components for the Whiz. Murphy?d leapt at the chance, he said, because he admired Stapp and the groundbreaking work he was doing.
According to Murphy, he sent his equipment out to Edwards and it worked well for a few tests. But then something went wrong. Stapp called him to say that he?d ?risked his neck riding on that darn sled? and the instruments had produced no data. ?So I got on the next airplane to Muroc and had a meeting with him,? Murphy explained. ?And I said all right, let?s see the accelerometers.? An examination revealed to Murphy that ? like Hill and Nichols said ??they had put the strain gauges on the transducers ninety degrees off.?
Yet contrary to what Nichols said about Murphy not taking the blame for the trouble, Murphy said in the interview that he felt ? to a certain degree ? it was his fault. ?I had made very accurate drawings of the thing for them, and discussed it with the people who were going to make them? but I hadn?t covered everything,? he sighed. ?I didn?t tell them that they had positively to orient them in only one direction. So I guess about that tim
All of Physics may be deduced from this statement.
He who has the gold makes the rules.
Murphy's number one rule:
Never mess with Mrs Murphy.
They also cite John Glenn from Into Orbit 85 who says that "'Murphy' was a fictitious character who appeared in a series of educational cartoons put out by the U.S. Navy"
works well in politics... when you do something malicious, always be prepared to assign it to your "stupidity".
Step one: elect a president everyone thinks is stupid.
Step two: do whatever
Step three: oops! we're just so stupid! Innocent harmless stupid person over here, bless our hearts!
-pyrrho
At the bottom of this page, I see a quote by Larry Wall:
...
Perl is designed to give you several ways to do anything
Ol' Murphy would be proud!
Yeah, I still love SOD myself. Had a cassette of theirs at some point, ehich qualifies me for a free MP3 download of their album. (I think they only had one...had like 20 songs on it)
Man, those were the days. Pre-Anthrax, rofl.
SPEAK ENGLISH OR DIE!
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
If there's anyone who's right it probably is Chuck Yeager. In the third article he says "You tell it the way you believe it and that's not necessarily the way that it happened. There's nothing more true than that." And I think that's all there is to it. At least until we get to see the 4th and final part ;-)
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
C. Northcote Parkinson: Parkinson's Law Or The Pursuit Of Progress (Penguin, (1986) pp.14-24)
The liver is evil and must be punished.
Shredded Cabbage
Yeah, I still love SOD myself. Had a cassette of theirs at some point, ehich qualifies me for a free MP3 download of their album. (I think they only had one...had like 20 songs on it)
They had two, for awhile anyway. Speak English or Die, then Live at Budokan. A few years back, though, they got back together and made Bigger than the Devil.
Man, those were the days. Pre-Anthrax, rofl.
Actually, iirc, they recorded the original SOD tape with extra studio time they had left during Among the Living. It may have been Spreading the Disease. IN any case, Anthrax had already put out 3 albums (well, 1 ep, 1 album, and working on another) when they did the first SOD tape.
I get a kick out of singing Speak English or Die, though. You come into this country, you take upo all our jobs. Boats and boats and boats of you go home you fuckin' slobs. heh.
But man, they were like prescient. I think George W. Bush took them a little too seriously, man. "Fuck the middle east, there's too many problems. They just get in the way, we can sure live without 'em. They hijack our planes, and raise our oil prices. Let's kill them all and have a ball and end their fuckin' crisis." Heh. Except that I think they wrote that song when the Libya thing was going on.
YOu should be virutally guaranteed to find them on WinMX right now, since I'm logged in. ;)
Like what I said? You might like my music
If an article should be read before commenting on whether or not it's "old news", it won't be read.
Don't touch Mrs. Murphy.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You really need +1 Clever.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Something like "If there are two or more ways of doing something and one of them is wrong, the wrong one will invariably occur"
I am not behind, I am just SO FAR AHEAD it looks that way :)
Woohoooo! Thanks for sharing that, it's like an early christmas!
"I tell it the way I remember it, and that's not the way it happened."
(This new sig is from this article, too :)
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Too fatalistic, Murphy was said to have said.
HE said he said "If there are 2 way do something sooner or later the wrong one will be tried."! [Polarized plugs were OK w murphy.]
This only works if the UPS guy isn't cixelsyd.