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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 ?"
this is psuedo science at best.
A scientific law should be provable by repetation. You can't know somehting will go wrong every time.
"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.
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
Urgency and aggravation are measured on their own relative scale, as percentages of unity (0.0->1.0). Urgency is asymptotic to the deadline, and aggravation is a combinatoric of other factors, possibly even keyed to the multidimensional gravity vector of the iotas of info. Schneidics postulates that just as space = gravity = matter = energy, so does energy = info. We're all describing schneidodynamics, detailing mechanisms that can be engineered into applications. Current mathematical tools are mostly targeting applications in grant engineering.
--
make install -not war
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.
Well, I've read (through) both the Principia, and various Russell papers. I'm even going out to the New York Public Library to look at an original copy, as I've also looked at an original copy of Einstein's "relativity" and "photoelectric effect" papers. Where do you think these axioms come from? Observation, experience. I recommend Kant's _Philosophy of Pure Reason_, and his examinations of the "a posteriori / synthetic" category of reason. Of course, mentation (even German ;) doesn't fit neatly into a box, but the philosophy of science depends on some observations. This Murphy formula is as mathematical as Newton's "F = ma", or his "inverse square law", even if it is a joke.
"It's funny because it's true!" - Homer Simpson
--
make install -not war
From:
women = (evil) ^ 2
Follows:
women = +/- evil
There are those of us who know and associate with women who possess negative evil.
Except that F, m, and a are all objectively quantifiable. Aggrivation is subjective and therefore not quantifiable into an equation. I suggest changing the equality to proportionality, that way we can just fudge the subjectiveness away ;)
I concur, this is exactly how military risk assessment worksheets work. I kind of like this new version a little better though. PHB aggravation factor is useful.
It basically boils down to how often do you do a thing? (frequency). How bad can the worst failure be? (importance).
Mitigating factors (skill, urgency). Which basically gives you what British Gas came up with.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
This, however, isn't:
:)
http://www.matrix-evolutions.com/
Despite the URL, there is some serious and, as far as I can tell, correct math proving Bush wrong. Just skip to the last paragraphs to see how mathematics defines 'significant'
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
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 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
>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.