User manual

AppleSauce

November 2003

Contents

Computing at

Entropy House

Incoherent comment...

Computing at

One assumes that Frank is a ‘little-endian’ after he

wrote “The October edition of AppleSauce

<eAS1003.pdf> is now available for download...” in a

message to members. It’s actually eAS0310.pdf: ‘03’ is

the year, ‘10’ the month, in abbreviated ISO 8601 for-

mat, which goes year, month, day, hour, minute...

Never mind, you found it anyway.

This year’s Ig® Nobel prize for Engineering went to

‘The late John Paul Stapp, the late Edward A Murphy Jr,

and George Nichols, for jointly giving birth in 1949 to

Murphy’s Law, the basic engineering principle that “If

there are two or more ways to do something, and one of

those ways can result in a catastrophe, someone will do

it”’ <www.improb.com/ig/ig-top.html>

The law is usually abbreviated to ‘If anything can go

wrong, it will’, but it’s instructive to look at the history.

EJ Murphy was an engineer working on US Air Force

rocket sled experiments to test human acceleration

tolerances, the human being Major Stapp.

For one experiment 16 sensors were attached to the

subject’s body. There were two ways in which each

sensor could be stuck to its mount, and someone had

methodically fitted all 16 the wrong way round. Mur-

phy made his pronouncement, which was quoted by

Stapp a few days later at a press conference.

Before long, the saying had spread to other fields, and,

perhaps acting on itself, evolved to abbreviated vari-

ants. Strictly speaking, ‘Anything that can go wrong,

will’ is Finagles’s Law, or in the UK, Sod’s Law.