Murphy Breaks Strings.

[John Musselwhite]

At 12:03 AM 4/1/97 -0500, Mark wrote:

>You have hit on one of the stranger phenomena of the universe: warning a
>customer that strings may break prevents them from breaking. Not enough
>research has been done on this topic.

For anyone interested, this month's Scientific American has a very
interesting article on Murphy's Law, under which this may fall (see below).
It turns out that research has indeed been done on this topic recently and
the results are quite interesting.

I'll leave it at that until this month's issue is off the shelf.  S.A. has
to make some money too! <g>

However, at the risk of offending those gentle readers who may feel this
doesn't relate to pianos, I'd like to review just a few out of hundreds of
"Murphy's Laws" which we run into from time to time when dealing with our
favourite instrument. There is the traditional "If something can go wrong it
will." with which we are all familiar of course. Murphy's Law of
Thermodynamics, which states that "things get worse under pressure",
probably applies in full-force to CAUTs as well as those taking exams.

Another half dozen we run into in various areas are:

Repairs:   Everything takes longer than you expect.

Moving:   If there is the possibility of several things going wrong, the one
that will go wrong first will be the one that does the most damage.

Neglect:  Left to themselves, all things (including pianos) will go from bad
to worse. (in other words, nEtropy sI lAways nIcreasing)

Vandalism:  It's impossible to make something foolproof because fools are so
ingenious. This applies to everything from piano locks to wandering benches.

Wood:  Nature always sides with the hidden flaw. What more can be said?

and on the subject of nature and what the weather does to pianos:

- Mother nature is a b*tch.

Breaking strings without warning a customer it may happen may actually fall
under one of the collection of Murphy's Laws called "Warren's Law", coined
by publisher Sam Warren. It states that "The likelyhood of something
happening is directly proportional to the amount of trouble it will cause if
it does happen."

BTW, the data in that Scientific American article appears to suggest
something we've known all along...  that Murphy (whoever he was) was an
optimist.

(Thanks to the Murphy Center for the Codification of Human Experience for
the paraphrased examples above)


John Musselwhite, RPT
Calgary, Alberta Canada
musselj@cadvision.com