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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."
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
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.
The ultimate pessimism:
An optomist can never be pleasantly surprised.
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.
Well, no.
Murphy was an Engineer. His original formulation "'if there is any way to do it wrong, he will", has some value in ergonomic design. Controls should be designed so as to eliminate chance accidents. For instance, in computers, most connectors are shaped, or keyed, so as to reduce the chances of someone plugging in wires the wrong way.
Some accidents are avoidable. Some are not. The adage "Shit Happens", while perhaps emotionally comforting, may lead some to confuse an entirely avoidable situation with the truly unpredictable.
Busted.
If you'd actually read the article, you'd see that the writers covers the story in the preface of the book and researches it in much greater detail. Apparently everyone involved at the time has their own version of the story, and some of them have rather strong feelings about it. It's really an interesting read. it's too bad the link is posted before all 4 parts of the article are finished.
- sig? who is this sig of which you speak?
Mother nature sides with the hidden.
If it's flaws you're hiding,
That's where nature's siding.
Another important attribute of ma nature, complementary to that cast-iron skillet she keeps hidden behind her apron; Nature bats last.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You've obviously never seen someone shove a monitor plug in upside down. Shapes and keys be damned ... it will happen. It just takes a large enough idiot.
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.
I note that almost none of the recent connector designs share the DB configuration used by VGA plugs. DVI does, but at least it's internally keyed.
Personally,I look forward to connectors that can be plugged in despite low lighting and cramped conditions, purely by feel, without risking pins on a cable, that by some fiat (FCC?), is non-replaceable.
I've noticed that, in terms of direct consequences, there isn't much difference between the actions of deliberately evil people and the hopelessly oblivious and ignorant.
Most of the people cutting you off on the freeway belong to the latter category, as much as we tend to think of them in the former.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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.