Murphy's Law
Or rather, "things go wrong". Who was Murphy?
Here is Wikipedia had to say:
Murphy's law is a popular adage in Western culture, which broadly states that things will go wrong in any given situation. It is most commonly formulated as "if anything can go wrong, it will." The law was named after Edward A. Murphy, Jr., a development engineer working for a brief time on rocket sled experiments done by the United States Air Force in 1949.
The law is also known, sometimes with a slight variation, as Finagle's law or Sod's law, with the latter being the more common name in the UK.
This law comes to mind as I am now typing on my one week old hotshot laptop from Dell. The same Dell that now says upon boot up on a blank black screen that I have "decreasing memory". The only thing I can surmise is that one of my DIMMS is loose and now needs to be replaced. After the message, I can hit F1 to continue or F2 to go to Set Up. The regular boot routine never happens now. This is after shelling out major dollars of the a nice laptop. Within ONE WEEK this maching is having problems. Actually, the fact that many computers actually funtion correctly is a miracle considering how complex they are.
I think this is a particularly interesting perspective:
"whenever a buttered slice of bread falls on the floor, people tend to remember more vividly the times that it fell buttered-side-down, since a buttered-side-up landing is of lesser consequence. Hence, one gets the impression that the bread always falls buttered-side-down, regardless of the actual probability of either happening. Laws such as Murphy's are a direct expression of such seeming perversities in the order of the universe.
Additional mutations of the law and its corollaries have developed, many of them meta-laws in some way, either through some form of self-reference or referral to other laws or analogies. For instance, the buttered-bread analogy could be further extended: "The chance of a dropped slice of bread landing buttered-side down on a new carpet is proportional to the price of the carpet." (If the buttered side falls facing up, then obviously the wrong side is buttered.) A further example is Murphy's Ultimate Corollary: "If it could have gone wrong earlier and it didn't, it ultimately would have been beneficial for it to have." John Gall's systemantics offers further expansion of Murphy's law.
Here is Wikipedia had to say:
Murphy's law is a popular adage in Western culture, which broadly states that things will go wrong in any given situation. It is most commonly formulated as "if anything can go wrong, it will." The law was named after Edward A. Murphy, Jr., a development engineer working for a brief time on rocket sled experiments done by the United States Air Force in 1949.
The law is also known, sometimes with a slight variation, as Finagle's law or Sod's law, with the latter being the more common name in the UK.
This law comes to mind as I am now typing on my one week old hotshot laptop from Dell. The same Dell that now says upon boot up on a blank black screen that I have "decreasing memory". The only thing I can surmise is that one of my DIMMS is loose and now needs to be replaced. After the message, I can hit F1 to continue or F2 to go to Set Up. The regular boot routine never happens now. This is after shelling out major dollars of the a nice laptop. Within ONE WEEK this maching is having problems. Actually, the fact that many computers actually funtion correctly is a miracle considering how complex they are.
I think this is a particularly interesting perspective:
"whenever a buttered slice of bread falls on the floor, people tend to remember more vividly the times that it fell buttered-side-down, since a buttered-side-up landing is of lesser consequence. Hence, one gets the impression that the bread always falls buttered-side-down, regardless of the actual probability of either happening. Laws such as Murphy's are a direct expression of such seeming perversities in the order of the universe.
Additional mutations of the law and its corollaries have developed, many of them meta-laws in some way, either through some form of self-reference or referral to other laws or analogies. For instance, the buttered-bread analogy could be further extended: "The chance of a dropped slice of bread landing buttered-side down on a new carpet is proportional to the price of the carpet." (If the buttered side falls facing up, then obviously the wrong side is buttered.) A further example is Murphy's Ultimate Corollary: "If it could have gone wrong earlier and it didn't, it ultimately would have been beneficial for it to have." John Gall's systemantics offers further expansion of Murphy's law.
posted by Chris at 5:59 PM
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