Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
WHAT should we call the phenomenon exemplified by Feedback's perception that "anyone who suspects the probability of a set of independent failures occurring together to be vanishingly small should urgently make plans to cope with them all happening at once" (7 March)? So far, 21 readers have been keen to help.
Six of you suggested Murphy's law, also known as Sod's law: "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." Bill Sloman noted the "necessary corollary that whichever name you use for it won't be the one used by the person you are talking to". Bob Malcolm was reminded of a journalist asking a UK Met Office spokesperson, in the aftermath of some weather phenomenon, "Why can't you predict these freak events?"
Bob also likes the "Law of the Inevitability of Freak Events", ...
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