Laws and Principles (some humourous) of Life
Thursday, October 20th, 2005 at 06:03pm
Through my semi-regular random skim through things such as popular del.icio.us links I can across a posting on the Signal vs. Noise weblog about not breaking Parkinson’s Law. One of the comments to this referenced a page on the Canadian Society for Biomechanics site entitied Laws and Principles (some humourous) of Life.
There are two things I want to say about this:
Firstly I want to comment on how the social nature of the web (I don’t really like that name but it is appropriate in this context) can bring together interesting pieces of content. All without a search engine and knowing what I was looking for. I one sense I was letting the community direct my navigation…
My second comment is that a lot of these laws and principles ring true. In particular:
- Parkinson’s law
“work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” - Brooks’ law
“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”
(this is the classic law from The Mythical Man-Month) - Dijkstra’s Prescription for Programming Inertia
“If you don’t know what your program is supposed to do, you’d better not start writing it” - Gray’s Law of Programming
“n+1 trivial tasks are expected to be accomplished in the same time as n trivial tasks” - Logg’s Rebuttal to Gray’s Law of Programming
“n+1 trivial tasks take twice as long as n trivial tasks”
Logg’s rebuttal is proven true whenever a manager is under the expectations of Gray’s law…
Tagged with: humour, productivity
