Murphy's Law

Three decades ago -- During the mid 1970s I was enrolled in a community college in a technical specialization program. It focused on educational media technology. That is where I learned how to produce slide presentations, as we called them. And my college classroom is where I also learned "Murphy's Law: 'Everything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong.'" (See Murphy's Laws website). To quote from Wikipedia:

Murphy's law emerged in its modern form no later than 1952, as an epigraph to a mountaineering book by Jack Sack, who described it as an "ancient mountaineering adage":

Anything that can possibly go wrong, does.[4]

Yale Book of Quotations editor Fred R. Shapiro has shown that it was also in 1952 that the adage first was called "Murphy's law," in a book by Anne Roe, quoting an unnamed physicist:

There were a number of particularly delightful incidents. There is, for example, the physicist who introduced me to one of my favorite "laws," which he described as "Murphy's law or the fourth law of thermodynamics" (actually there were only three last I heard) which states: "If anything can go wrong it will."[5]

Disappointment -- How many times have you attended a workshop, a conference, a classroom's guest speaker's talk, or a lecture where the presenter included a slide show? And how many times has the slide part not gone well? Murphy's Law and slide presentations are very well acquainted old friends. They often meet in the auditorium or the classroom.

These insidious incidents can include such things as a slide being in upside-down or backwards, the slides and voice track being out of sync, or the slides refusing to show themselves at all. Perhaps the slide projector is not there as ordered. Or the slide tray could have been accidentally left at the office or at home. Other mishaps might include the room being to brightly lit from uncovered windows, the audience coming back from lunch surfeited and drowsy. I get anxious just thinking about Murphy's law and slide shows.

Murphy's laws and corollaries of technology include these Top 10 that apply. To quote:

1. Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand. (4)
   
2. The attention span of a computer [slide projector] is only as long as it electrical cord. (7)
3. A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost. (14)
4. A failure will not appear till a unit has passed final inspection. (16)
5. A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. (30)
6. Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables the organism [audiovisual] will do as it damn well pleases. (34)
   
7. When all else fails, read the instructions. (44)
8. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. (45)
9. Build a system that even a fool can use and only a fool will want to use it. (49)
10. The degree of technical competence is inversely proportional to the level of management. (50)
    

The next century -- Now we have "slide shows" on the Internet. They are a lot of fun to put together and not nearly as subject to Murphy's Law as when I was first learning. Blogger recently introduced their version of one for us to use in our blogs: "Show off your photos with the new SlideShow." My post on the subject, "Eye Candy: Slide Shows," has gotten a lot of interest from readers.

SlideShow -- My Making Good Mondays blog has its own SlideShows. In the upper left corner of the page is, "Life Is Good." At the bottom of this column is one titled "Spacey Shots;" it originated from my Picasa web albums. They still seem to be working, amazingly well. Enjoy!

Cross-posted at Southwest Blogger

My topical post today at South by Southwest and The Reaction is about politics.

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