A Commonplace Book

Parkinson's Fourth Law:
The number of people in any working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done.

Mitchell's law of committees:
Any simple problem can be made insoluble if enough meetings are held to discuss it.

Hartley's Second Law:
Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself.

Lewis's Law of Travel:
The first piece of luggage out of the chute doesn't belong to anyone, ever.

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.

Murphy's Law:
If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe then someone will do it.

Murphy's Law of Research:
Enough research will tend to support your theory.

Scott's first Law:
No matter what goes wrong, it will probably look right.

Law of Probable Dispersal:
Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.

Brooke's Law:
Whenever a system becomes completely defined, some damn fool discovers something which either abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition.

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.

Weinberg's Second Law:
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

Meader's Law:
Whatever happens to you, it will previously have happened to everyone you know, only more so.

Finagle's Third Law:
   In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct, beyond all need of checking, is the mistake.
Corollaries
   1. Nobody whom you ask for help will see it.
   2. The first person who stops by, whose advice you really don't want to hear, will see it immediately.

Grandpa Charnock's Law:
You never really learn to swear until you learn to drive.

Fifth Law of Procrastination:
Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that there is nothing important to do.

Slick's Three Laws of the Universe:
   1. Nothing in the known universe travels faster than a bad check.
   2. A quarter-ounce of chocolate = four pounds of fat.
   3. There are two types of dirt: the dark kind, which is attracted to light objects, and the light kind, which is attracted to dark objects.

Drew's Law of Highway Biology:
The first bug to hit a clean windshield lands directly in front of your eyes.

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.

Law of Communications:
The inevitable result of improved and enlarged communications between different levels in a hierarchy is a vastly increased area of misunderstanding.

Watson's Law:
The reliability of machinery is inversely proportional to the number and significance of any persons watching it.

Parkinson's Fifth Law:
If there is a way to delay in important decision, the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.

Putt's Law:
Technology is dominated by two types of people: Those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.

Mondaugen's Law:
Personal Density is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth.
    Temporal bandwidth is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "delta-t" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your personal. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even — as Slothrop now — what you're doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment....

Ozman's Laws:
   1. If someone says he will do something "without fail," he won't.
   2. The more people talk on the phone, the less money they make.
   3. People who go to conferences are the ones who shouldn't.
   4. Pizza always burns the roof of your mouth.

Lackland's Laws:
   1. Never be first.
   2. Never be last.
   3. Never volunteer for anything

H. L. Mencken's Law:
Those who can -- do.
Those who can't -- teach.
Martin's Extension:
Those who cannot teach -- administrate.

Non-Reciprocal Laws of Expectations: Negative expectations yield negative results. Positive expectations yield negative results.

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.

Stigler's Law of Eponymy:
No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.

Godwin's Law: prov.: [Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.

Zawinski's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the "Law of Software Envelopment") to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a side effect of that). It is commonly cited, though with widely varying degrees of accuracy.

Bruno's Laws

1. Never Assume - Anything about anything or anyone. Typically, the user who says "I've looked in the catalog and you don't have the book" or the colleague who says "I've checked every conceivable source." Skepticism as process.
2. Get Off Your Duff - Pointing has its place, Emily Post to the contrary, but the skilled librarian never simply points the user to a complex or "iffy" source. If there is any doubt that the user might run into problems, MOVE.
3. Attempt to Answer the Original Question - During the reference interview, it often turns out that the question is reformulated. This is fine, but take care to respond to the question as asked. Example:

   Original question: "Where are the books on England?"
   Reformulated question: "Where can I find information on the Gunpowder Plot?"

   Somewhere, early into the interview if possible, indicate that if the user truly does wish to browse the stacks, many books on England can be found in the DA section on the fifth floor. In this way he/she perceives that the request for help has been fully heard.
4. Never Take Anything Interesting to Read With You to the Desk - Not terribly interesting, anyway. If you're absorbed, with head lowered, you'll appear to be unapproachable.
5. Make it a Practice to Follow up on Unresolved Questions - This applies to questions you feel could have been answered better, even if the user has long since left the building. For several reasons: Sometimes the user returns. The question, or one like it, will probably come up again. It's a good device for testing new sources ("I wish I'd known about this last week.") A back burner, for odd moments on rainy Tuesdays, is a fine device.
6. Keep in Mind - You may have heard the question a thousand times, but it's the first time the user has ever asked it.
7. Dress Comfortably.
8. Avoid Library Jargon Like the Plague - If you tell someone to look under the main entry, the chances are good that he/she will find it -- and leave through it.
9. Be Prepared to Drop all Conversations with Colleagues the Instant a User Shows Up - No one will be offended by this standard practice.
10. Before Coming to the Desk, try to Take a Few Minutes for Mental Calisthenics - The desk shift should be approached for the fun and challenge that it is.
11. Always Pass Along any Useful Information You Encounter in a Search.
12. Be as concrete as possible when giving directions ("the second door on the white wall").

Amara's Law. We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

Kranzberg's First Law: Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.

...By that I mean that... technical developments frequently have environmental, social, and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purposes of the technical devices and practices themselves... Hence many technical applications that seemed a boon to mankind when first introduced became threats when their use became widespread....

The point is that the same technology can answer questions differently, depending on the context into which it is introduced and the problem it is designed to solve.

Kranzberg's Fourth Law: Although technology might be a prime element in many public issues, nontechnical factors take precedence in technology-policy decisions.

Engineers claim that their solutions to technical problems are not based on mushy social considerations; instead, they boast that their decisions depend on the hard and measurable facts of technical efficiency, which they define in terms of input-output factors such as cost of resources, power, and labor.

[But] engineers do not always agree with one another; different fields of engineering might have different solutions to the same problem... [and] technological developments frequently have social, human, and environmental implications that go far beyond the intention of the original technology itself.

As soon as you try to measure how well people are doing, they will switch to optimising for whatever you're measuring, rather than putting their best efforts into actually doing good work.

In fact, this phenomenon is so very well known and understood that it's been given at least three different names by different people:

- Goodhart's Law is most succinct: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

- Campbell's Law is the most explicit: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

- The Cobra Effect refers to the way that measures taken to improve a situation can directly make it worse.

HANLON'S RAZOR:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

[S]o many modern physicists continue to embrace philosophical determinism. But their theories are deterministic because they've written them that way. We say that the laws [of physics] govern the universe, but that is a metaphor; it is better to say that the laws describe what is known. In a way the mistake begins with the word "laws." The laws aren't instructions for nature to follow. Saying that the world is "controlled" by physics--that everything is "dictated" by mathematics--is putting the cart before the horse. Nature comes first. The laws are a model, a simplified description of a complex reality. No matter how successful, they necessarily remain incomplete and provisional.