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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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.