Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Define Murphy's Law
Jesrad writes "A mathematician, a psychologist and an economist commissioned by British Gas have finally put into mathematical terms what we all knew: that things don't just go wrong, they do so at the most annoying moment.The formula, ((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10)), indicates that to beat Murphy's Law (a.k.a. Sod's Law) you need to change one of the parameter: U for urgency, C for complexity, I for importance, S for skill, F for frequency and A for aggravation. Or in the researchers' own words: "If you haven't got the skill to do something important, leave it alone. If something is urgent or complex, find a simple way to do it. If something going wrong will particularly aggravate you, make certain you know how to do it." Don't you like it when maths back up common sense ?"
Women are evil.
Maths doesn't work like that. Writing something down as a formula doesn't automatically tell you something new or prove something.
It sounds like they're trying to describe how things can go wrong with a formula. That's nice, but it's just their opinion.
Jesrad writes "A mathematician, a psychologist and an economist commissioned by British Gas have finally put into mathematical terms what we all knew: that things don't just go wrong, they do so at the most anno.... 503 service unavailable
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;if you're "S" was higher, you'd be able to tell us. ;treehead
"If any part Linux was stolen, then Windows was the biggest heist in history."
it's not "((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10))" ...
it's "((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(cos(F/10))".....
cmon guys... this is clearly BS..... it's like the formula for measuring happiness in currency.... pure BS...
-Leav
I own a pump action golf ball cannon. I made it myself.
this is psuedo science at best.
A scientific law should be provable by repetation. You can't know somehting will go wrong every time.
Quick, somebody start arguing about probability!
Now, when is biology gonna disect a gremlin?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I guess this formula is perfect for risk managment. I mean you can now quantitavely tell your boss that the project is not worth it.
"from the brillaint-or-pathetic dept."
he knows this is BS too...
-Leav
I own a pump action golf ball cannon. I made it myself.
Better avoid a frequency of exactly 5*Pi.
math+uselessness=stupidity That formula means nothing to mathematics, it's just a stupid way to say something everybody already knows in English. You can't prove such a formula because it has to do with people(irritatingly inconsistant systems), not math(nicely consistant- 2+2 always = 5 ).
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
...commissioned by British Gas...
I guess this helps explain while oil prices are so high....
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
"things don't just go wrong, they do so at the most annoying moment"
That's because, when things go wrong, it becomes the most annoying moment. My dishwaster just starting leaking all over the floor btw. Damn you murphy!
Bumper sticker for me!
((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10))
Yeah baby! Learn it, live it, love it!
Actually, this formula is my life story in a nutshell.....
..about common sense.
Notice the foot? It's supposed to be a somewhat humorous little blurb about something silly.
What a fun crowd we've got around here on Sunday...
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Although this is slightly off-topic, I often wonder what the average energy draw of a Slashdotting would be on a particular website. I mean a webserver will only serve so many requests and the draw would be somewhat constant, but what if the site is round-robinned or some other load-balance. What about the combined power it takes to route packets to/from the server? Would be kinda a neat nerd figure to have.
Sig it.
No, mathematics is exactly that: a description of the phenmoena. The "laws" we're always talking about are just reasonable expectations of consistent phenomena, phrased to exclude irrelevant factors and products, while describing the relationships between the phenomena actually involved. "The map is not the territory". Math is the map. Observations are facts, and formulae are strict, testable interpretations of patterns among facts. Opinions are based on beliefs and faith - so one can have an opinion about a fact, or a formula, but the formula itself is another form of idea: a theory, which is a testable statement about facts. The tests themselves often tell something new, and proofs are typically produced by analyzing the formula with other proven mathematics. That's how we can base our physics on Newton's _Principia Mathematica_, although his math is in an archaic language little resembling modern algebra or the calculus it spawned.
--
make install -not war
Ignorant yank.
British Gas 'supply' natural gas, not petroleum.
You're thinking of BP.
Since, after all, they included a sin() call. As everyone knows, it's not real math unless it includes a trigonometric function. And lots of parens. Gotta have lots of those.
Shame they didn't work in some of those cool Greek characters, though.
Experts at British Gas indeed. Why? How? No one is even telling us the quantity that is being calculated in this dubious formula.
If you don't know, guys, kindly don't pass it on. So far it's just noise. Here's a slightly better link, but still not, in my opinion, enough to bother with.
mt
An equation that explains Everything! so now lets put it on a t-shirt!
My friends love using quantifiers on values that can'be given a number:
:)
"I have hundreds of luck. HUNDREDS!"
So, what are the units of urgency, complexity, importance, skill, frequency and aggravation?
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
And from today's joke at thehun.com (link not work safe!!) ...
From a strictly mathematical viewpoint it goes like this:
What makes 100%?
What does it mean to give MORE than 100%?
Ever wonder about these people who say they are giving more than 100%?
We have all been to these meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%
How about achieving 103%? What makes up 100% in life?
Here's a little mathematical formula that might help you answer these question.
If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.
Then:
H A R D W O R K
8+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%
K N O W L E D G E
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%
But:
A T T I T U D E
1+20+20++9+20+21+4+5 = 100%
And:
B U L L S H I T
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%
AND, Look how far ass kissing will take you.
A S S K I S S I N G
1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 118%
So, one can conclude with mathematical certainty that whilst hard work and knowledge will get you close, and attitude will get you there, it's the bullshit and ass kissing that will put you over the top.
Well, the site's down now. Right when I was about to click on the link to RTFA. Figures.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Finally the science of schneidics has gained some academic traction. We've been mapping the normisphere for decades, and schneidotechnology is just over the horizon. We've experimentally determined that the normisphere, a probability "black hole" surrounding the probability totalities of jinxes. We've measured the probability field warps, events that can go wrong, in murphys, and annihilation of incoming events, things that do go wrong, in normys. This new formalization of schneidics will help us in our pursuit of science underpinning the "T = $" equivalence (Time = Money) leading to our ultimate engineering goal: splitting the penny, or shattering the moment, depending on which side of the '=' the proportionality constant falls.
--
make install -not war
However, perhaps we are all a little quick to judge. After all, all we have is a news summary. We must wait for the full article to come out in a scientific journal. May I suggest Annals of Improbable Reaserch ? Scorn it now, but perhaps we are seeing next year's recipients of the ig Noble Prize?
Statistically it might be possible to describe this properly, if such a relationship did in fact exist. The problem here is that all the variables seem to be ordinal values and they give no instructions on how to convert them into cardinal values in terms of their function. That makes it also quite interesting how they got the constatants. On the other hand would every properly derived formula suggest that the implied relationship does not exist. Then again that seems quite boring.
Leave your sense of humor in your other pants today?
So what mode should the calculator be in for the sine bit?
Actually, by definition, this cannot be the forumla Murphy's law, because Murphy's law must have surely caused something to go wrong with the formula......
...MICROSOFT never followed the formula and advice for solving it!
This belongs in the company of
"The Effect Of Country Music On Suicide" and
"Coordination Modes in the Multisegmental Dynamics of Hula Hooping"
---
The Ig Nobel Home Page
....decended from the genocide and propaganda of England subjugating Ireland. It's called Sod's Law - and don't you ever use that racist talk on here again.
"Don't you like when math backs up common sense?"
yes, yes I do. I also hate when stupidity attempts to back up mythology.
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
"If anything can go wrong, it will" is a lot easier to understand and alot more reasonable... stupid mathematicitians.
So, when we're trying to estimate the parameters, we take logs and get:
log(U+C+I) + log(10-S) - log20 + logA - log(1-sin(F/10))
That means that we can estimate the effects of skill, aggravation and frequency separately, but the effects of urgency, complexity and importance can't be separated from one another.
I'm pretty sure there's some deep, philosophical meaning to that.
See what I've been reading.
is what? The number of times per week something will go wrong? A probability function describing the frustration field in the vicinity of a piece of hardware? The length of the scientist's nose?
Where's the equals sign? Or comparison operator? Where's the other half of the equation?
It's cute that somebody's multiplied a bunch of parameters. But they haven't said (mathematically) what that means.
Murphy's law is a humorous observation at man's frustration with the universe. A mathematical descrption of Murphy's law would be scientific humor.
What was reported by NEWS.com.au (and repeated by
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Not safe for work link? No kidding! If masturbating won't make you blind, thehun.com's color scheme will!
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
But, what happens when their formulation of the law goes wrong? Oops.
This formulation was created as a way to formalize the common sense phrasing. Just because they turned it into a bunch of symbols doesn't mean that it adds any validity or explains anything new.
Is actually an inverse corollary of the Schroedinger's cat equations:
"Anything that can go wrong, already has, but you won't observe it until the most critical time."
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Does this mean they can defy it?
did you forget to take your meds?
It's the Law of Go Figure that rules my life.
Like when you're looking for somebody inside a building. You park next to their car and go inside to find them. If you don't leave a note on their car, they will come out the other door, get into their car without noticing yours, and leave. If you do leave a note, you'll meet up with them inside. Go figure. It's similar, but it's not the same.
I always wonder about those types of "laws"--nobody compares the number of times things go wrong at the worst possible moment to the number of times they do so at the best possible moment, or to the number of times they don't go wrong at all, or to the number of times things save your ass by going "wrong." I think it's pretty obvious that you only notice the times that really suck. I've posted thousands of messages on the internet--sometimes the page gets borked and I lose my post, but it's not exactly a given that if I spend an hour on something then Firefox is going to eat it.
Same for the Law of Go Figure, much as I like it. Seems that if I think "I should save now even though I'm not done" and then get distracted and keep writing, the post does get eaten. But I've started to look for the times that it doesn't and it seems like I do just notice the times that fit my theory.
It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye. Then it's fun and games without depth perception.
Yeah. And S L A S H D O T = 19 + 12 + 1 + 19 + 8 + 4 + 15 + 20 = 98% = H A R D W O R K
Decide for yourselves!
Free XBox, PS2
When asked why so many of his psychotherapy patients commit suicide, Dr. Lewis went on to say, "You're implying something went wrong. They would have become serial murderers or child rapists if I handn't helped them. Are you saying I should be aggravated over the outcome of having saved lives while protecting little children from molestation? If I didn't have the skills I have, you might not be standing here asking such questions, you Wanker."
Seastead this.
S L A S H D O T
:)
19+12+1+19+4+15+20=90%
which could make one think that work=10% but since
W O R K
23+15+18+11=67%
one should be able to prove for any PHB that slashdot and work overlaps by at least a staggering 57%
Btw why post this as AC? You should get recognition for this
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
It's not, it's not the same thing as Sod's Law, and the law you're thinking of is Finagle's.
Ironicly, having it called Murphy's Law by a reporter from the Courier-Mail is an example of Murphy's Law.
This isn't Murphy's Law, it's Finagle's Law.
This sig no verb.
oops missed an 8 in slasHdot, revise all numbers accordingly
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
Einstein did a much better job applying pseudo-math to real life :
Murphy's Law: If it can go wrong it will
Sod's Law: It will go wrong at the worst posible time.
-
"I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous." - David Bradley, inventor of Ctrl-Alt-Del
Sod's law states that "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong" - then why even attempt quantifying it?
If the law is true, then any attempt to quantify it will be flawed ; and if false then there's no need to.
With an intro like that, it's got to be a joke. I suppose that if you search here, you'll find that missing punchline. Maybe this is it?
Q: What's the difference between mathematics and economics
A: Mathematics is incomprehensible; economics just doesn't make any sense.
See what I've been reading.
I knew this sounded like a bunch of hot air!
Hmm... does this cover the chances that you'll leave the porn in the VCR on the day the wife's gonna record a Lifetime movie?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10))
The parent is noting that if you plug in 5*(pi) into F, you get sin(5*(pi)/10), which equals sin((pi)/2), which equals 1. The problem occurs when you evaluate this part: 1/(1-sin(F/10)), because you get 1/(1-1), which is 1/0, and division by 0 is prohibited.
For example, the exclamation point key will stop working on a keyboard: Murphy's Law.
/. and completely reverse the subject's meaning: Sod's Law.
It'll do it when typing a subject into
And yes, it really did stop working. Bugger.
((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10)) (U+C+I)(10-S)/20 Min: (.05) Ave: ~3 Max: (12) (A very hard task at medium skill level warrents a ~6) A = .7
1/(1-sin(F/10))
Min: (1)
Ave: ~1.8
Max: 4
(Assuming this formula outputs a percent.)
Average percent of something going wrong with the best conditions: .03%
Average percent of something going wrong with average conditions: ~3.8%
Average percentage of something going wrong with the worst conditions: ~33.6%
Basically, when a task is very hard, very complex, and of course very important, YOU are incompetent, and it occurs rapidly, one third of the time, you will screw up. At most important tasks, we'll screw up 3 out of a 100 times.
This seems reasonable. We usually don't remember or realized the 97 times we do something right, but the three times that we do lose our Word document, download, or jobs, we definately WILL.
It is a joke people. No need to question who did it or what school they went to or discuss the merits of trying to explain the nature of probability in a formula.
A FUCKING JOKE. If you need it simpler it is like the old "You can have it fast, good or cheap. Pick two" but with more braces.
Seriously read the comments. A lot just don't seem to get it at all. Those few who did. Thank god. All hope is not lost. To those who didn't go I recommend suicide. Make the world a happier place.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I suppose it's only a matter of time before someone formulates "stating the bleeding obvious"...
""A mathematician, a psychologist and an economist commissioned by British Gas have finally put into mathematical terms... Murphy's Law (a.k.a. Sod's Law)."
That'll explain why British Gas "had to" increase the price of energy: to pay for such folly as this.
not as good as the perfect first formula on Murphy's Law. The man who had discovered the very first mathematical formula for Murphy's Law wanted to keep it secret until he would reveal it to all in a press conference. Unfortunately for him and us, his only copy of his work was saved on an Iomega Jazz drive which went dead 5 days later...
..is because there are so many more ways something can go wrong than it can go right. Just as the overwhelming majority of genetic mutations are harmful, if there are more disagreeable outcomes than agreeable ones, the chances are you'll get the former rather than the latter.
It's the outstanding skills that makes your chances to get laid negative
"So, if you haven't got the skill to do something important, leave it alone."
If you go back to the original statement, Murphy was stating an obvious and mathematically provable fact.
...), you need a backup plan because there is a good probability that *something* will eventually go wrong. (If something eventually goes perfect, do don't need to plan for it).
When you design something like a bridge, there is a possibility that some improbable even (like an earthquake or hurricane) can bring down the bridge. There's also a probability that there will be moments when the wind and water will be still, the ground will be stable, and no traffic will go on the bridge for days at a time. The first case stresses the bridge past it's limits. The second case removes all additional stress from the bridge.
When you design a bridge, you really don't care about the second case since all you care about is that the bridge is still standing and is functional. You need to care about the worst case because if it happens, lives and billions of dollars are at stake.
So basically Murphy said, if some event can happen (e.g. 9/11 or a pandemic or "the big one" earthquake or
How is this unreasonable?
Reminds me of "Stranger in a Strange Land," where there are professional witnesses trained to report only the truth of what they observe.
Don't you like it when maths back up common sense ?
The equation in the post is a model---an invention for the purposes of prediction and description. It's effectively a mathematical restatement of common sense insights and (hopefully) statistical tendencies derived from psychological and economic studies. So to say that this work backs up common sense is missing the point to some extent: most of the meat was there first as common sense, and the math just expresses it more precisely and more in keeping with observed data.
Note that F=ma and the rest of Newton's laws also form a model in the same way that this equation does. What made them so revolutionary was that the ideas behind the models were very powerful, making the models themselves extremely accurate. We'll have to wait and see whether this Murphy's Law model is backed by similarly potent insights.
--Tom
MAN SHOOTS ROVER!
From:
women = (evil) ^ 2
Follows:
women = +/- evil
There are those of us who know and associate with women who possess negative evil.
... at the most annoying time?
Hmmm, now which one(s) of the formula are responsible?
Hmmm, Hmmm.... could it be all of them?
I think the problem is that the joke isn't funny. Since one of the distinguishing traits of a joke is being funny, this joke is hard to recognize as a joke.
To those who find this joke funny, I recommend suicide. You're perverting the one thing that could make the world a happier place.
Seems like we need Neo to balance out the equation...or did I get something wrong in Matrix?
I think it's pretty obvious that you only notice the times that really suck.
That's exactly what I thought when I saw their "research methods": tests of the experiences of 1000 people. Whether they asked people to record their experiences or to remember them, I would think that their results would be heavily biased towards exceptional situations, resulting in a much higher probability than really exists.
And for those of you who are complaining about no equals sign in the equations, RTFA. "the formula allows people to calculate the chances" of things going wrong... It's a probability, which means there's an implied "P=" at the beginning, and the resulting quantity is between 0 and 1. Each of the factors are "given a score between one and nine"... I don't see any problem with how you can calculate it or what the result would be, mathematically speaking.
I also think this is crap, but it's because of the subjectiveness of recording human experience and of assigning the score values.
I wonder how long before somebody starts using this in an RPG?
Sure he does, but not his spelling
Now, if we could get him to lay off the funky color schemes in the sub-sections we'd be getting somewhere!
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Just when you thought that Slashdot articles couldn't get any worse....
eTrade SUCKS
DeLoreans traveling at 88 mph generate the same frequency. Major time paradox.
You still take slashdot seriously? It's like a michael moore movie - entertainment that calls itself something else, but that's just part of the show.
The last line proves it is a joke article:
Top of the most likely - and most annoying - events was spilling something down yourself before a date and the hot water heater breaking down in cold weather, followed by rush hour being worse when you're already late.
Yes, those are the most annoying events: spilling and being late. Aids, death, murder,war, rape, body parts chopped off, blindness, disease, torture; these do not compare.
These factors are often multiplied together to result in a number that is used to prioritize the limited funds available to process improvement or maintenance.
These ideas are not new . . . they were developed by Japanese manufacturers and the US auto industry decades ago . . They are called Failure Modes and Effects Analyses. They are often used in conjunction with statisical process control efforts to reduce variability and downtime.
are trying to decide if girlfriends or wives are better.
./).
The economist says that wives are better because you have to spend more money on girlfriends.
The psychologist says that girlfriends are better because they make you feel younger.
The mathematician says that he prefers to have both. That way, his wife always thinks he's at his girlfriend's place, his girlfriend thinks he's at home, and he can go to the office and get some goddamn work done!
(Yes, I realize a joke about wives and girlfriends might be out of place on
People want things fast(U), fixed_right(function
of S and C), fixed_cheap(a function of fixed_right(S,C) , U).
As U+S+C gets closer to 27 the closer you get to
impossiblity.
Man will I get my coffee in this morning?
((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10))
Urgency = yeah I'd give that a 50, I mean it's pretty urgent.
Complexity = it's pretty simple so a 1.
Importance = it's not important for my boss, but really important for me, so a 400.
Skill = well a child or drunk person might have problems, so it sounds like a 4.
Frequency = well, I'll probably want 2 cups today.
Aggravation = yeah I'll get really aggrivated without my coffee, so 100 is about right.
Let's see plug all those in:
((50 + 1 + 400) x (10 - 4)) / 20 x 100 X 1/(1 - sin(2/10))
bust out calc.exe and punch in the numbers right:
1.3482771486352022902422017615702
Alright now I'm rocking. There is 1.3482771486352022902422017615702 that I'll get my 2 cups of coffee today. Glad that's straightened out.
PS. I think magic 8 ball is faster.
I expect to see this in the Annals of Improbable Research. Maybe they're bucking for an Ignobel Prize.
Or as Mike's(Murphy's brother) law would have it, Shit Happens!
INTERESTING ADDENDUM FROM RBL (first featured in RBL's KISS Guide to
Windows, 1999): http://rblevin.net
It's ironic. One of the world's favorite axioms on the inevitability of
failure is itself an example of such inevitability. It's Murphy's Law, most
often stated as "anything that can go wrong, will." The irony: That's not
Murphy's Law at all. It's "Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives," devised by
the famous science fiction author Larry Niven. The real Murphy's Law was
coined sometime around 1949 by USAF engineer Edward A. Murphy Jr.
Murphy was part of a team of USAF engineers working on a project that tested
the effects of extreme G-forces on the human body. One such test involved
mounting 16 sensors to 16 different parts of the test subject's body. Each
sensor could be connected in one of two ways: Correctly or incorrectly. On
the first run, a technician installed all 16 sensors backwards, after which
Murphy issued his now-famous maxim: "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." Someone did, and now Finagle's Law is almost always misrepresented as Murphy's.
I have a short fuse, so:
((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10))
should be rewritten as:
((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A^2 x 1/(1-sin(F/10))
!!
-bk
For those that didn't RTFM, the value for each variable should be on a scale of 1-9, with 9 being very high. A (aggrivation) should be 0.7 as set after the study. I put together something in PHP just to do the work for me. The biggest variable seems to be skill--with all others set to very high (9) it certainly "proves" that an idiot can totally screw stuff up.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
life = you + screwed;
stuck_under_tire_power_cord == (power_cord_in_use + power_tool)
if (hot_chick) return;
Taking the joke seriously for a moment, and having not RTFA, I feel compelled to point out one obvious flaw in the formula. Namely, the final term, 1/(1-sin(F/10)), contains a division by zero if the value of F is 5*pi (or 25*pi or ...). What sort of tomfoolery *is* this? =)
.f00Dave
Murphy's second law (authorship stolen from anonymous):
/.??
Murphy was an optimist.
Murphy's third law:
Whoever said I was an optimist was making an understatement. -Murphy
Now, how does that change the equation? Oh yeah you can divide by zero.
P.S.: considering complexity, deadline urgency and frequency factors(among others), one does not have to know much about Microsoft to assume more bugs per employee per year are produced there than elsewhere... I wish there was an objective way to count bug aggravation to prove the equation right so I could turn my boss over to freeBSD...
Or maybe my pointed-haired boss will read
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.
Why should I take opposition to a joke? Because this humor defines what people what thought systems are practical. (It did for me.) Should I just accept that all the chaff in my biological thinking unit on some little mudball in the MilkyWay is superduper -- or should I strain at the leash of thought?
The hermetic nature of basic math is from a limitation of mathematicians, us, rather than math itself.
This year I finally caught the joke of the Einstein poster where he says, "Whatever you problems are with math I can assure you that mine are far greater." I think there are three types of human responses to that: think he meant he was bad at arithematic and was making fun, or to understand that he was grappling with the big chimeras, or to make the transition from the former state to the latter which is realization.
And I think I need to make up a joke to combat the sheep joke.
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
I don't recall a period where Slashdot understood math jokes. It's not as if the first batch of users were especially well-learned in that department.
For a fascinating read on the origins of Murphy's law, check out
9 /v 9i5/murphy/murphy0.html
http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume
Ah yes, but
www.slashdotdot.org gives you:
23 + 23 + 23 + 19 + 12 + 1 + 19 + 8 + 4 + 15 + 20 + 15 + 18 + 7
= 207%
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
A mathematician, a psychologist and an economist ...
When I first read that part, I thought it was going to be a bad joke.
I know you are being funny, but this is a real problem, not just in "social sciences", but also in medicine. How do you measure pain? If you can't, how do you test the efficacy of a given drug, or compare the effects of two drugs? Similarly with nausea, anxiety and a host of others. VAS (visual analogue scale) was developed and validated just for data like these. Also, look up Likert scale
Yes, I know the original article was tongue-in-cheek
It amazes me that I'm not seeing more people complaining about this.
Sod's law(Finagle's law) states that if anything can go wrong it will. It is merely a pessimistic statement.
Murphy's law states that if there are two or more ways to do something and one of them will result in catastrophe then someone will do it. It is an engineering observation that is supposed to encourage proper design, i.e. don't provide more than one proper way of doing something or don't allow any of the multiple ways of doing something to cause a catastrophe.
That is the most offtopic post I've seen today! It has NOTHING to do with the parent at all!
((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10)) This obviously returns a data-type mismatch.
A tidy argument for synthetic a priori. Props to JRaven and Doc Ruby.
Who's complaining... but this was the story that I had rejected on Friday October 08, @01:20PM. Well picked up.
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
To everybody, I recommend suicide. Here, drink some of this cool-aid, it'll put you in the mood.
-Jim Jones
This particular article was accompanied with a graphic of the formula, which showed the equation with "20-sin(1-F/10)" for 1-sin(1-F/10).
it makes me no sense what the unit of the sine might be, but i suspect that it's supposed to represent coversine.
In any case, the equation can be written in a form that is dimensionally correct, by writing the equation in the form
(U+C+I)(D-S)/sqrt(2)D(1-sin(QF/D)),
U urgency 1..9
I importance 1..9
C complexity 1..9
S skill 1..9
F frequency 1..9
D denominator 10
Q full angle 90 deg
where D is the denominator of the scale. This means that if you make D=12, then everything still works out, if you rate the thing 1..11.
What is also missing is Q, the unit of angle representing a full range. According to the thing, it is open, but i suspect that Q = 1 quadrant.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
It's simple. If we assume that the chance of a slashdot user of getting laid is:
sin(x)
------ - 1 = f(x)
x
And that x is equal to the distance that a slashdot user is from his (or the unlikely her) computer desk, then we simply calculate:
lim f(x)
x->0
Which anyone knows is equal to 0.
is not what Principia or ZFC gives you. It is
too powerful eg to transform the proofs you
get with that into an algorithm you can use
on a computer. So there is some interest in
the area where mathematics mixes with computer
science to use weaker logics (eg "constructive
logic"). Tweaking the axioms (like which
version of the axiom of choice do we need for
prooving that theorem) then certainly is
influenced by observation.
To get your way strike down the range of other possible outcomes.
You're cursing the wrong guy. The real (Edward A.) Murphy(, Jr.) can't be blamed for your dishwashers leakage because (a) he is dead now AFAIK and (b) he was an aircraft engineer, not a diswasher technician...
--
Try Nuggets , the mobile search engine. We answer your questions via SMS, across the UK.
urgency = depends
complexity = low
importance = high
skill = low
frequency = high
aggravation = low
((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10))
((depends + low + high) x (10 - low))/20 x low x 1/(1-sin(high/10))
I'm appalled that nobody caught the misuse of the word "aggravation" when the proper word choice is "irritation." I guess our schools are worse than I thought.
How sad.
Self awareness - try it!
I find this similar to the axiomatic question: Why is it that whenever you lose something it is ALWAYS in the last place you look.
The answer is an exercise for the reader.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
>Apparantly not and many others like him don't /. home of the nerd/geek who
>get it either. Read the comments below and weep
>for what once was
>understood math jokes.
To be fair, though, we ought to recognize that as math jokes go, it's particularly badly constructed and not very funny. Understanding the joke in this case amounts to something rather like, "Oh - a nonsense formula which isn't even flushed out enough to be engaging. Guess it was meant to be a joke. Pity they didn't do more with it."
If one is going to go to the trouble of sending up a story in the papers, it's worth spending at least a few moments putting together something coherent. They could at least tell us what the formula is supposed to do (as written, it ain't a probability) and choose sane parameters. "Frequency" measured on a scale of 1 to 9 is silly without being quite silly enough to be funny on it's own.
Given a couple of hours, one could put together something really quite detailed and almost believable. Toss in amusing anecdotes about data collection and recommendations for government or military organizations, and it could be great fun. Start off with a few pages of just barely plausible stuff, and then dive into total absurdity at the end. Hell, one could even toss in *actual* data collected in some obviously crazy way and make an AIR-worthy article out of it.
If we're going to bemoan the decline of the geek slashdot reader, we had better include a lament for the geek prank story writer.
But you knew that.
Formula for the probability that a silly joke will be written up on Slashdot in a given month:
P = 1
where P is the probability and m is the given month.
If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.
Then:
H A R D W O R K
8+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%
Er, doesn't A = 1?
In that case, the forumla is 8 + 1 + 18 + 4 + 23 + 15 + 18 + 11.
The result is the same though: 98%
If something can go wrong with something going wrong, it goes right?
This sig intentionally left blank.
Because it wouldn't make much sense to keep looking after you found it?
You've got serious categorization issues. And you're a prick.
Do you think that this story was posted under "it's funny. Laugh" by accident?
If you, even for a second, thought this was claiming to be serious mathematics, I pity both you and the mods who modded you to +3.
Which just goes to show that common and sense are two words that do not go together. I think this is just more proof that sense is not common at all.