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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."
So there you have it. Truth according to the Internet. :)
No, it isn't:
If you wash your car to make it rain, it will not rain, even though it normally rains right after you wash your car.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
...would Murphy's Law be a dictatorship, a democracy, or something else?
Bureaucracy.
It takes the longest amount of time to do anything, spends the most amount of time to do it, and still doesn't accomplish what it set out to do.
"...At the end of the day"..."when everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself." RIP Layne Staley
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.
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.
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.
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