the.com/murphys law
if a bolt can be installed backward, someone on your team just did it.
means the folk principle that anything capable of going wrong eventually will, so build like it already has.
from named after edward a. murphy jr., an engineer on 1949 air force rocket-sled tests studying g-forces on the human body; when sensors were wired wrong by an assistant, murphy griped that if there was a way to do it wrong, the guy would find it, and the project's stress analyst turned that gripe into the law we quote today.
origin year1949, edwards air force base
subjectcolonel john stapp, human deceleration tests
murphy's own denialhe called it an engineering safety principle, not pessimism
pop spreadpopularized by a 1950s press conference, not murphy himself
for instance
challenger o-rings — 1986, known cold-weather failure mode ignored, then it failed
titanic lifeboats — 1912, the unsinkable ship carried too few, and needed them
y2k bug — decades-old date shortcut became a global scramble by 1999