Scientists Define Murphy's Law 324
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 ?"
Bullcrap (Score:2, Interesting)
A scientific law should be provable by repetation. You can't know somehting will go wrong every time.
well, at least Cmdr. Taco isn't stupid... (Score:2, Interesting)
he knows this is BS too...
-Leav
Scientific Humor (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:equals (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparantly not and many others like him don't get (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:equals (Score:3, Interesting)
"It's funny because it's true!" - Homer Simpson
Not quite... (Score:2, Interesting)
women = (evil) ^ 2
Follows:
women = +/- evil
There are those of us who know and associate with women who possess negative evil.
Re:equals (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Er... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Er... (Score:3, Interesting)
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'
that is not a limit on math (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
nonquantifiable data (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:Apparantly not and many others like him don't g (Score:2, Interesting)
>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.