Spooge's Spit Up - Murphy's Law
For most of us, it's practically a fact of life that bread always falls buttered side down and the traffic's always worse when you're running late for work.
But now, scientist have come up with a mathematical formula proving that anything that can go wrong, really will go wrong. A panel of experts commissioned by British Gas has come up with a statistical rule for predicting Murphy's Law.
Scientists tested 1000 people before arriving at the formula that they believe allows people to calculate the chances of Murphy's Law striking, and then try and beat the bad luck. The factors that are taken into account when making the calculation, are:
- the urgency of what you're doing;
- the complexity of the task;
- its importance;
- your skill in it;
- the frequency with which you do it;
- and the amount of aggravation you're suffering.
The project's psychologist says that to reduce your chances of being struck by Murphy's Law, you need to change one of the elements in the equation.
For anyone interested in trying it out, here's the equation:
((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10))
In the calculation, five factors have to be assessed:
- urgency (U),
- complexity (C),
- importance (I),
- skill (S) and
- frequency (F)
and each given a score between one and nine. A sixth, aggravation (A), was set at 0.7 by the experts after their poll.
Top of the most likely - and most annoying - events was spilling something down yourself before a date and the boiler breaking down in cold weather, followed by rush hour being worse when you're already late.
The equation has seven steps to forecasting a potential Murphy's Law moment, so you can work out which factors you need to change to avoid it:
- Rate the urgency, importance and complexity on a scale of one to nine and add the three figures together
- Rate from one to nine how skilled you are at the task, then subtract this from 10
- Multiply answers to 1 and 2 and divide by 20
- Rate from one to nine how frequently you perform the task and divide this by 10
- Rate the sine (or sin) of your answer to step 4 and subtract this from 1
- Divide 1 by your answer to step 5
- Multiply your answer to step 3 by 0.7 and multiply this by your answer to step 6, and that's your Sod's Law rating.
- The closer to 10 it is, the higher your risk of falling victim.
I'd be interested to hear your results. I'd particularly like to know if anyone can apply the formula to the US election and tell me if Murphy's Law will strike George Dubya Bush.
Lastly, here's an interesting conundrum I've been puzzling over:
Can Murphy's Law strike itself?
If so, would it then, like a double negative, cancel itself out such that everything that can go right, will go right?
Source: AAP
Thanks to the "Raw Prawn" for this great formula
3 comments:
Nice Blog :)
here i am, commenting like a hooker!!!
that'll be $100 please.
Friz: Aren't Toe Socks Enough lol
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