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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."
Murphy was an optimist.
is also known as Sod's law in the UK
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
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!
"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..
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
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
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.
We are all individuals!
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.
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.
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
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.
Murphy's law
alt.binaries.erotica.hamster.ducktape
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.
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 !
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.
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
Apparently even Murphy's Law went wrong. Thus proving Murphy's Law.
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.
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.'"
... you just have to follow a simple pattern:v 9i5/murphy/murphy4.html
http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume9/
Enjoy!
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.
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.
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
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE