Mostly found on the Internet (usually produced by 'fortune').
Disclaimers: (1) I am willing to recognize
other collections like most notably: Arthur Bloch, Murphy's Law,
Bruna, Utrecht (Dutch translation), 1990, but I did not use them for
typing in the contents. (2) I am not sure about all attributions.
I have added Newton's Law, but for Archimedes, Kepler, Torricelli,
Boyle-Gay Lussac, Snellius, Hooke, Kirchhoff and others, you'll have to
look elsewhere.
The Abrams' Principle: The shortest distance between two points is off the wall.
Rule of Accuracy: When working toward the solution of a problem, it always helps if you know the answer.
Amdahl's Law: Performance is dominated by the slowest component.
Anonymous (so far): This is not a bug, it's a feature.
Anthony's Law of Force: Don't force it; get a larger hammer.
Anthony's Law of the Workshop: Any tool when dropped, will roll into the least accessible corner of the workshop.
Corollary: On the way to the corner, any dropped tool will first strike your toes.
Fourth Law of Applied Terror:
The night before the English History mid-term, your Biology
instructor will assign 200 pages on planaria.
Corollary:
Every instructor assumes that you have nothing else to do
except study for that instructor's course.
Fifth Law of Applied Terror:
If you are given an open-book exam, you will forget your book.
Corollary:
If you are given a take-home exam, you will forget where you live.
Arnold's Laws of Documentation:
Arthur's Laws of Love:
Atwood's Corollary: No books are lost by lending except those you particularly wanted to keep.
St. Augustine: The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
Dave Bartley's Law: Be suspicious of anything that works perfectly -- it's probably because two errors are canceling each other out.
Beckhap's Law: Beauty times brains equals a constant.
Beifeld's Principle: The probability of a young man meeting a desirable and receptive young female increases by pyramidal progression when he is already in the company of: (1) a date, (2) his wife, (3) a better looking and richer male friend.
Bernard Berenson: Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
Benson's Dogma: ASCII is our god, and Unix is his profit. [Gary Benson]
First Law of Bicycling: No matter which way you ride, it's uphill and against the wind.
Bradley's Bromide: If computers get too powerful, we can organise them into a committee - that'll do them in.
Boob's Law: You always find something in the last place you look.
Boren's Laws:
The Briggs - Chase Law of Program Development: To determine how long it will take to write and debug a program, take your best estimate, multiply that by two, add one, and convert to the next higher units. (See also: Westheimer)
Brook's Law: If at first you don't succeed, transform your data set!
Brooke's Law: Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool discovers something which either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition.
Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. (F.P. Brooks: the mythical man-month (1974))
Bucy's Law: Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
Second Law of Business Meetings:
If there are two possible ways to spell a person's name, you
will pick the wrong one.
Corollary:
If there is only one way to spell a name, you will spell it
wrong, anyway.
Chapin's Law of Motion: You can get anywhere in 10 minutes if you drive fast enough.
Grandpa Charnock's Law: You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.
Cheop's Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
Chism's Law of Completion: The amount of time required to complete a government project is precisely equal to the length of time already spent on it.
Chisolm's First Corollary to Murphy's Second Law: When things just can't possibly get any worse, they will.
Arthur C. Clarke's Law : It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
Andrew B. Folkins' Corollary: It has yet to be proven that USENET has any intelligence value.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage.
Law of Communications: The inevitable result of improved and enlarged communications between different levels in a hierarchy is a vastly increased area of misunderstanding.
First Computer Axiom: When putting it into memory, remember where you put it.
Laws of Computer Programming:
43rd Law of Computing:
Anything that can go wr
fortune: Segmentation violation -- Core dumped
Conway's Law:
In any organization there will always be one person who knows
what is going on.
This person must be fired.
Cygnus's FAQ on Windows 95
(from the FAQ for Cygnus Software's GnuWin32 Project):
Windows 95: n.
32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit
patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit
microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of
competition.
Dalgish's Law: Good Judgement comes from experience, Experience comes from bad judgement.
Rule of Defactualization: Information deteriorates upward through bureaucracies.
Iron Law of Distribution: Them that has, gets.
Drew's Law of Highway Biology: The first bug to hit a clean windshield lands directly in front of your eyes.
Emersons' Law of Contrariness: Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can. Having found them, we shall then hate them for it.
Extended Epstein-Heisenberg Principle:
In a programming atmosphere, only two of the three existing
measurements can be measured simultaneously. The measurements are
Program, Time and Resources ($).
If one knows what the task is, and there is little time allowed for
the completion of the task, then one cannot guess how much it will
cost.
If the time and resources ($) are clearly defined, then it is
impossible to know what part of the program will be performed.
If you are given a clearly defined program goal and a definite
amount of money which has been calculated to be necessary for the
completion of the task, on cannot predict when the goal will be
reached.
If one is lucky enough and can accurately define all three
measurements, then what one deals with is not in the realm of
programming.
Non-Reciprocal Laws of Expectations: Negative expectations yield negative results. Positive expectations yield negative results.
Featherkile's Rule: Whatever you did, that's what you planned.
Felson's Law: To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.
Finagle's first Law: If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Finagle's second Law: No matter what the anticipated result, there will always be someone eager to (a) misinterpret it, (b) fake it, or (c) believe it happened according to his own pet theory.
Finagle's third Law:
In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct,
beyond all need of checking, is the mistake.
Corollaries:
Finagle's fourth Law: Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it only makes it worse.
Firestone's Law of Forecasting: Chicken Little only has to be right once.
Firestone's Law of Aging:
Just when you think you are over the hill, you find there's another
hill. And it's steeper.
Cf. http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/~rfire/humor.html
Flap's Law: Any inanimate object, regardless of its position, configuration or purpose, may be expected to perform at any time in a totally unexpected manner for reasons that are either entirely obscure or else completely mysterious.
Flon's Law: There is not now, and never will be, a language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad programs.
Forsyth's second corollary to Murphy's Laws: Just when you see the light at the end of the tunnel, the roof caves in.
Keep in mind always the two constant Laws of Frisbee:
Fudd's First Law of Opposition: Push something hard enough and it will fall over.
A Law for the Future: If it's not in a computer, it doesn't exist.
Gallois's Revelation: If you put tomfoolery into a computer nothing comes out but tomfoolery, but this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and none dare criticise it.
Glib's Laws of Unreliability:
Golub's Laws of Computerdom: (Bolub's?)
Grosch's Law: Computing power increases as the square of cost increases. If you want to do it twice as cheaply, you have to do it four times as fast. Twenty per cent of the components account for eighty per cent of the cost, and so forth.
Graham's Law: The manual is useless.
Corollaries:
<marv Graham; Convex Computer Corp. {allegra,ihnp4,uiucdcs,ctvax}!convex!graham>
Gray's Law of Programming: 'n+1' trivial tasks are expected to be accomplished in the same time as 'n' tasks.
Logg's Rebuttal to Gray's Law: 'n+1' trivial tasks take twice as long as 'n' trivial tasks.
Gummidge's Law: The amount of expertise varies in inverse ratio to the number of statements understood by the general public.
Gumperson's Law: The probability of anything happening is in inverse ratio to its desirability.
Hacker's Law: The belief that enhanced understanding will necessarily stir a nation to action is one of mankind's oldest illusions.
Harper's Magazine Law: You never find the article until you replace it.
Harrisberger's Fourth Law of the Lab: Experience is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined.
Hartley's First Law: You can lead a horse to water, but if you can get him to float on his back, you've got something.
Hartley's Second Law: Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself.
Harvard Law: Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.
Heller's Law: The first myth of management is that it exists.
Johnson's Corollary: Nobody really knows what is going on anywhere within the organization.
Hoare's Law of Large Problems: (Hare's?) Inside every large problem is a small problem struggling to get out.
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account.
Horgan's Homily: We don't have personal computing until we can get them little and talking.
Horner's five Thumb Postulate: Experience varies directly with equipment ruined.
Howe's Law: Everyone has a scheme that will not work.
Hunt's Law of Suspense: If any work has a suspense date on it, that work will be completed as close to the suspense date as possible regardless of how far in advance it was programmed.
Jacquin's Postulate on Democratic Government: No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
Jenkinson's Law: It won't work.
Johnson's First Law: When any mechanical contrivance fails, it will do so at the most inconvenient possible time.
Johnson's Third Law:
If you miss one issue of any magazine, it will be the issue that
contains the article, story or installment you were most anxious
to read.
Corollary to Johnson's Third Law:
All of your friends either missed it, lost it or threw it out.
Jone's Law: The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on.
Jones' First Law: Anyone who makes a significant contribution to any field of endeavor, and stays in that field long enough, becomes an obstruction to its progress -- in direct proportion to the importance of their original contribution.
Katz' Law: Man and nations will act rationally when all other possibilities have been exhausted.
Kinkler's First Law: Responsibility always exceeds authority.
Kinkler's Second Law: All the easy problems have been solved.
Kok's Laws of Bicycling and Appointments:
Landau's Programming Paradox:
The best programmer has to be someone.
The more human-like a computer becomes, the less time it spends
computing and the more time it spends doing more human-like work.
A software committee of one is limited by its own horizon and will
specify that far.
Langsam's Laws: 1) Everything depends. 2) Nothing is always. 3) Everything is sometimes.
Lieberman's Law: Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter since nobody listens.
Lowery's Law: If it jams -- force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.
Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology: There's always one more bug.
Magary's Principle: When there is a public outcry to cut deadwood and fat from any government bureaucracy, it is the deadwood and the fat that do the cutting, and the public's services are cut.
Maier's Law:
If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be
disposed of.
Corollaries:
Main's Law: For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.
Majority: That quality that distinguishes a crime from a law.
Malek's Law: Any simple idea will be worded in the most complicated way.
Meader's Law: Whatever happens to you, it will previously have happened to everyone you know, only more so.
H. L. Mencken's Law:
Those who can -- do.
Those who can't -- teach.
Martin's Extension:
Those who cannot teach -- administrate.
H. L. Mencken: For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Mencken and Nathan's Second Law of The Average American: All the postmasters in small towns read all the postcards.
Mencken and Nathan's Ninth Law of The Average American: The quality of a champagne is judged by the amount of noise the cork makes when it is popped.
Mencken and Nathan's Fifteenth Law of The Average American: The worst actress in the company is always the manager's wife.
Mencken and Nathan's Sixteenth Law of The Average American: Milking a cow is an operation demanding a special talent that is possessed only by yokels, and no person born in a large city can ever hope to acquire it.
Meskimen's Law: There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over.
Miksch's Law: If a string has one end, then it has another end.
Mitchell's Law of Committees: Any simple problem can be made insoluble if enough meetings are held to discuss it.
Moind's Fourth Postulate: The degree of certainty in one's level of competency is inversely proportional to the actual level.
Moore's Law:
Circuit density doubles every eighteen months.
Cf.
http://research.microsoft.com/users/Gray/Moore_Law.html
Moore's Second Law: Further miniaturization is less likely to be limited by the laws of physics than by the laws of economics. [ quoted from Robert Noyce, Intel, 1977 ]
Mosher's Law of Software Engineering: Don't worry if it doesn't work right. If everything did, you'd be out of a job.
Murphy's Law: 1. If anything can go wrong, it will.
Many Corollaries.
Addition to Murphy's laws:
In nature, nothing is ever right. Therefore, if everything is
going right... something is wrong.
Murphy's Law is recursive. Washing your car to make it rain doesn't work.
Murphy's Law of Research: Enough research will tend to support your theory.
O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law: "Murphy was an optimist."
Naeser's Law: You can make it foolproof, but you can't make it damnfoolproof.
The Programmer's Nemesis: Experts theorise that, through evolution and inbreeding, programmers may become a distinct species of the human race.
Newton's Law: Force equals mass times acceleration.
Newton's Little-Known Seventh Law: A bird in the hand is safer than one overhead.
Oliver's Law: Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
Oliver's Law of assumed responsibility: If you are seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Osborn's Law: Variables won't; constants aren't.
Pardo's First Postulate: Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.
Arnold's Addendum: Anything not fitting into these categories causes cancer in rats.
Parker's Law: Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
Parkinson's Fourth Law: The number of people in any working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done.
Parkinson's Fifth Law: If there is a way to delay in important decision, the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.
Paul's Law: (1) You can't fall off the floor.
Paul's Law: (2) In America, it's not how much an item costs, it's how much you save.
Captain Penny's Law: You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you Can't Fool Mom.
Law of the Perversity of Nature: You cannot successfully determine beforehand which side of the bread to butter.
Peter's Law of Substitution: Look after the molehills, and the mountains will look after themselves.
The Peter Principle: In an organization, each person rises to the level of his own incompetency.
The Third Law of Photography: If you did manage to get any good shots, they will be ruined when someone inadvertently opens the darkroom door and all of the dark leaks out.
Pierce's Law: In any computer system, the machine will always misinterpret, misconstrue, misprint, or not evaluate any math or subroutines or fail to print any output on at least the first run through. Corollary: When a compiler accepts a program without error on the first run, the program will not yield the desired output.
Pohl's Law: Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.
Rules of Pratt:
If a severe problem manifests itself, no solution is acceptable
unless it is involved, expensive, and time-consuming.
Sufficient monies to do the job correctly the first time are not
available; however, ample funds are much more easily obtained for
repeated revisions.
Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning: It's on the other side.
Law of Probable Dispersal: Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.
First Law of Procrastination: Procrastination shortens the job and places the responsibility for its termination on someone else (i.e., the authority who imposed the deadline).
Fifth Law of Procrastination: Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that there is nothing important to do.
Putt's Law:
Technology is dominated by two types of people:
Those who understand what they do not manage.
Those who manage what they do not understand.
Pudder's Laws: (see Murphy)
Fourth Law of Revision: It is usually impractical to worry beforehand about interferences -- if you have none, someone will make one for you.
Rudin's Law: If there is a wrong way to do something, most people will do it every time.
Roy Santoro's Law: If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law.
Safire's Rules for Writers (William Safire, 1929 - 2009):
Sattinger's Law: It works better if you plug it in.
Scott's first Law: No matter what goes wrong, it will probably look right.
Scott's second Law:
When an error has been detected and corrected, it will be found
to have been wrong in the first place.
Corollary:
After the correction has been found in error, it will be
impossible to fit the original quantity back into the
equation.
Law of Selective Gravity:
An object will fall so as to do the most damage.
Jenning's Corollary:
The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is
directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.
George Bernard Shaw's Paradox: We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
Shaw's Principle: Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.
Silverman's Law: If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Simon's Law: Everything put together falls apart sooner or later.
Simpson's Paradox: Well, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.
Skinner's Constant (or Flannagan's Finagling Factor): That quantity which, when multiplied by, divided by, added to, or subtracted from the answer you get, gives you the answer you should have gotten.
Slick's Three Laws of the Universe:
First Law of Socio-Genetics: Celibacy is not hereditary.
Underlying Principle of Socio-Genetics: Superiority is recessive.
Sodd's Second Law: Sooner or later, the worst possible set of circumstances is bound to occur.
Steinbach's Guideline for Systems Programming: Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle.
Stockmayer's Theorem: If it looks easy, it's tough. If it looks tough, it's damn near impossible.
Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crud.
Law on Supercomputers: The faster they go, the faster they go wrong.
The three laws of thermodynamics:
The First Law: You can't get anything without working for it.
The Second Law: The most you can accomplish by working is to break even.
The Third Law: You can only break even at absolute zero.
The Titanic effect: The severity with which a system fails is directly proportional to the intensity of the designer's belief that it cannot.
To everything that is `completely safe and reliable': So was the Titanic.
Troutman's Programming Laws:
Turnaucka's Law: The attention span of a computer is only as long as its electrical cord.
Tussman's Law: Nothing is as inevitable as a mistake whose time has come.
Unattributed - 1: Fallible men design fallible computers; A computer does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do.
Unattributed - 2: Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations we can do without thinking about them.
Unattributed - 3: One good reason why computers can do more work than people is that they never have to stop and answer the phone.
Van Roy's Law: An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys.
Velilind's Laws of Experimentation:
Wain's Conclusion: The only people making money these days are the ones making computer paper.
Watson's Law: The reliability of machinery is inversely proportional to the number and significance of any persons watching it.
Weiler's Law: Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.
Weinberg's First Law: Progress is made on alternate Fridays.
Weinberg's Second Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
Weiner's Law of Libraries: There are no answers, only cross references.
Westheimer's Rule: To estimate the time it takes to do a task: Estimate the time you think it should take, multiply by two and change the unit of measure to the next highest unit. Thus, we allocate two days for a one hour task.
Wiker's Law: Government expands to absorb revenue and then some.
Williams and Holland's Law: If enough data is collected, anything may be proven by statistical methods.
George Winters' Law: If God had really intended men to fly, He'd have made it easier to get to the airport.
Woodard's Law: You can have it right, or you can have it now. But you can't have it right now.
Yes Minister's (or Jim Hacker's) First Law of Politics: Do not believe anything until it's been officially denied.
Yes Minister's (or Jim Hacker's) First Law of Political Indiscretion: Always have a drink before you leak.
Zymurg's seventh Exception to Murphy's Law: When it rains, it pours.
Zymurgy's Law of Volunteer Labor: People are always available for work in the past tense.
Zymurgy's first Law of Evolving System Dynamics: Once you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is to use a larger can (old worms never die, they just worm their way into larger cans).