DAY EIGHTY SIX

well dubb ETHNIC (not dubb, as we found out on friday) is fantastic. excellent service and when it's 50% off, a great deal.

My recent interest in 1970s science fiction appears to have abated and has been replaced by an interest in 1940s-current aerospace engineers and various rocket tecnologies. This will be the WEEK OF THE ROCKETS AND SPACE AND PLANES oh my!

k a bit more history on murphy's law, which I think i posted about last week with almost no explanation. Read more about it here.

Murphy's law was not originally called such, but the concept has been there for over 140 years. There's reports of it in an 1877 journal, and it may have existed before that:

It is found that anything that can go wrong at sea generally does go wrong sooner or later.

- Wikipedia article's quote

Identified variously as an engineering, magic, and mountaineering adage, it was still not known as Murphy's law. In fact, the first instance of it being called Murphy's law was in 1949, when the name still vied with Reilly and Strauss for a figurehead. While the folks involved with Murphy's work at the time didn't really like him, his name ultimately won out as the winner for whom the law was named after - a fact which he may not have known:

Up until that moment, he’d [Nichols] always assumed Ed Murphy knew that he was the Murphy. Now he became convinced that Ed hadn’t a clue about it, and was completely ignorant of his legacy. “He didn’t even know about Murphy’s Law until Bloch published his book,” Nichols says firmly. “And until I told him he was mentioned in it, he didn’t even get a copy.”

Turns out, Murphy was not too happy with the depiction of the reason that the law arose with his name associated with it (a long story regarding a test run on a series of tracks used to test rockets).

The most interesting part of the story is why one name won out over another, and why, historically, one series of ideas or thoughts wins out over others over time. Why did Murphy's name win? And for that, I have no answer, other than that perhaps it was because there was a story associated with it that people could tell on, rather than Reilly's and Strauss' laws, where they just associated it with the already well-known adage?

AND! in other news:

make yourself a rug!

way to go NYPD. fantastic showing regarding sensitivity towards this trans woman. belitting her, mocking her, asking about her genitals - very poor taste. but really - chaining her to a fence for 28 hours?