Thursday, May 05, 2005

Quote of the unspecified temporal interval

There are three schools of magic.

One: State a tautology, then ring the changes on its corollaries; that's philosophy.

Two: Record many facts. Try to find a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that's science.

Three: Be aware that you live in a malevolent universe controlled by Murphy's Law, sometimes offset by Brewster's Factor; that's engineering.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's Brewster's Factor? -Bo

Mr. Engineering Johnson said...

As I understand it, the idea is that every once in a while just the opposite of what you expect will happen, and it won't be frequent enough to predict. So in this case, once in a while you'll be caught off gaurd and nothing will go wrong.