Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Murphy's law [a] is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.".. Though similar statements and concepts have been made over the course of history, the law itself was coined by, and named after, American aerospace engineer Edward A. Murphy Jr.; its exact origins are debated, but it is generally agreed it originated from Murphy and his team ...
Sod's law, a British culture axiom, states that "if something can go wrong, it will". The law sometimes has a corollary: that the misfortune will happen at "the worst possible time" (Finagle's law). The term is commonly used in the United Kingdom (while in many parts of North America the phrase "Murphy's law" is more popular). [1]
Stein's law: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. If a trend cannot go on forever, there is no need for action or a program to make it stop, much less to make it stop immediately; it will stop of its own accord. Stevens's power law, in psychophysics, relates the intensity of a stimulus to its perceived strength.
Like a plane crash, poverty is rarely caused by one thing going wrong. Usually, it is a series of misfortunes—a job loss, then a car accident, then an eviction—that interact and compound. I heard the most acute description of how this happens from Anirudh Krishna, a Duke University professor who has, over the last 15 years, interviewed more ...
The adage was a submission credited in print to Robert J. Hanlon of Scranton, Pennsylvania, in a compilation of various jokes related to Murphy's law published in Arthur Bloch's Murphy's Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong! (1980). [1] A similar quotation appears in Robert A. Heinlein's novella Logic of Empire (1941). [2]
This is my annual “mea culpa” column, an end-of-the-year look back at what I got wrong and what (if anything) I got right. ... but I don’t think it’s going to really go anywhere. ...
Definitional retreat – changing the meaning of a word when an objection is raised. [23] Often paired with moving the goalposts (see below), as when an argument is challenged using a common definition of a term in the argument, and the arguer presents a different definition of the term and thereby demands different evidence to debunk the argument.
The proper title of the book is Murphy's Law, and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong!. The word wrong is printed upside-down on the book's cover. This was the first of many Murphy's Law books.