Murphy's Law (Complete)Arthur Bloch
Murphy's Law (Complete)
by Arthur Bloch · first published 1990
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A good set. Arthur Bloch's Murphy's Law and Other Reasons Why Things go ƃuoɹʍ is a compendium of engineering and organisational dictums. Of itself it provides relatively little insight, but many of the principles themselves trace to more substantive…
…point. My own career spans decades, large companies and small, old and new, and a few stints of government work as well. The thing this reminds me most of all is a very time-worn copy of Arthur Bloch's Murphy's Law: and other reasons things go ƃuoɹʍ. You can find most them here: http://www.murphyslaws.net/edition.htm It was at a highway rest stop on one of the long Interstate routes favored by aerospace engineers…
on “One hundred rules for NASA project managers (1995) [pdf]” ↗…from Joseph E. Bigler explaining that the quotation originally came from Robert J. Hanlon of Scranton, Pennsylvania, as a submission (credited in print) for a book 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). Subsequently, in 2002, the Jargon File entry noted the same. Earlier attributions to the idea go back to at…
on “CHP Arrests Driver Impersonating Chinese Paramilitary Police” ↗> “It is easier to get forgiveness than permission” appears earlier in Arthur Bloch, Murphy’s Law Book Two (1980) http://freakonomics.com/2010/06/24/quotes-uncovered-forgiven...
on “Apple gets smacked by $450M e-book price-fixing fine” ↗For an entry in a joke book, it has done a surprising amount of damage. edit - specifically, that mighty tome of great knowledge; 'Murphy's Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong!', by Arthur Bloch.
on “Facebook 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5M people's email contacts without consent” ↗…within a factor of two-ish) weeks (52 weeks -> 104 months (0.867 decades). I'm not claiming this is accurate, I'm stating that it's a heuristic I'm familiar with. This may have been in Arthur Bloch's Murphy's Law and Other Reasons Things Go Wrong, though I'm not finding it in comparable collections. Possibly from project planning literature I was reading in the 1990s (DeMarco & Lister, Brooks, Boehm, McConnell,…
on “When did estimates turn into deadlines?” ↗