The Murphy's Antithesis Project

Jerry Cates, EntomoBiotics Inc.

We are instinctively drawn to Murphy's Law.

It caught on because it struck a special chord in the human spirit. Each rendition of Murphy's Law kicked butt in some part of our psyche. Over its now 50-plus-years of existence it has grown into a list as long as one's arm, all without Murphy's help. He created it, Nichols documented it, others watered, nurtured, fertilized and coaxed it into a grander existence than he or Nichols ever imagined possible. Why has its opposite, Murphy's Antithesis, languished? Perhaps because it is opposite?

Murphy's Law works because it is pessimistic, and forces us to employ a pessimistic view of the state of things over which we have control.  That's where the use of Murphy's Law does its most good--precisely where we need it most, when we are enmeshed in a process that requires a sharp eye, and a critical analysis.  Optimism, in the midst of that process, has laid many a project in the dust, because optimism overlooks what pessimism would clearly see, and make necessary corrections for.

However, when facing things over which we have no control, pessimism leads to despair and paralysis.  Such times are precisely when we need to be hopeful and alert, willing and able to seize upon the most miniscule of opportunities to enable us to leap out of our present state of helplessness, into one of empowerment. Murphy's Antithesis serves that purpose. 

We created the first example of Murphy's Antithesis out of one of the original versions of Murphy's Law. What if we tried to do the same with every rendition? How would that affect our answer? It is hard to predict the outcome of such an effort, but it's worth a try.

In the right-hand column, below, some of Murphy's corollaries have been tentatively inverted to form a trial antithesis. Each tentative antithesis is printed in navy type. During the inversion process logical blunders will be made- Murphy's Law demands it. When you spot one, your job is to contact me and supply a "correct" inversion (though it might be argued there are no truly "wrong" ones). Some inversions are easy, but most are challenging, and some may be impossible. With a few, several possibilities present themselves. Must each inversion have a single solution? Not if what was good for the law is good for its antithesis. For the present, though, those with multiple inversions have been left in their original language, printed in brown type.

Some inversions, the first two for example, seem utterly pollyannaish. Where excessive pessimism worked for ML, excessive optimism may fail. But look at the inversion for #3... "Nothing is as hard as it looks." That statement has meat on its bones, because experience teaches us that impossibilities--i.e., those things that are as hard as they can get--are surmounted every day by those who laugh at the very idea of impossibility and forge onward with a positive attitude. And #23... "Everything gets better all at once." Does that ring any chimes? It should, especially if you have ever traded stocks in a bear market, or witnessed a person going through a fever crisis. 

Recently I viewed the film "Life as a House". At one point in the drama George (Kevin Kline) says this to a friend: "... hindsight- it's like foresight without a future." Profound? My first thought was that it might be a reasonable inversion of #129. Dr. Ian Lin, of The Regional Institute Ltd., put it another way, in a pregnant expression quoted below that links hindsight, foresight and insight in a chain that implicitly leads from shortsightedness to farsightedness:

          " Wisdom is combining hindsight with insight to gain foresight.
             We must learn from the past and understand the present in order to create the future"

Some of Murphy's Laws are their own best antitheses. #28 is a good example. So is #32 (provided you are a lawyer), not to mention #51 and #52. See if you can find more. For some, though, the antithesis cannot be stated merely by inverting one or two words, but requires a radical reframing of the thought; #58 is one example. 

Read the list below to inspire your own juices. Follow a path of discovery through the vast resources of the internet and mount your own attack upon a particularly challenging law. You may be surprised at the inversion you are led to. When "it" happens, share it with me, so I may post it here for others to appreciate and enjoy. 

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Murphy's Law (calculated pessimism, for things we have control over)

Murphy's Antithesis (measured optimism, for things we can't control)

1. The original Law: If anything can go wrong, it will.
2. An early variant: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, at the worst possible time.
3. An early corollary: Nothing is as easy as it looks.
4. Everything takes longer than you think.
5. Whatever can go wrong will.
6. If several things can go wrong, expect the one that will cause the most damage.
7. If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, that is when it will happen.
8. If something can't go wrong, it will anyway.
9. Given only four ways that a procedure can possibly go wrong, and a successful circumvention of all of them, a fifth will materialize.
10. Left to themselves, things always go from bad to worse.
11. If everything is going well, something important has been overlooked.
12. Nature sides with the hidden flaw.
13. The quest to make things foolproof is doomed to failure; fools are ingenious.
14. Every solution creates new problems
15. Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first.
16. Enough research will support any theory.
17. The legibility of a copy is inversely proportional to its value.
18. Given a long road upon which a one-way bridge and two cars are placed at random, the two cars will travel in opposite directions and meet at the bridge.
19. Things get worse under pressure.
20. Necessity is the mother of strange bed-fellows.
21. Any bus that can be the wrong bus will be; all other busses are out of service or full.
22. The more you run over a dead cat, the flatter it gets.
23. Everything goes wrong all at once.
24. If you need six buttons, you will find five in your button box.
25. After things go from bad to worse, the cycle repeats itself.
26. Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value
27. You cannot successfully determine beforehand which side of the bread to butter.
28. Paper is always strongest at its perforations.
29. The odds that a slice of bread will fall on the floor with the buttered side down is directly proportional to your hunger level.
30. Murphy was an optimist.
31. The lane you are not in moves fastest.
32. If there isn't a law, there will be.
33. That history repeats itself is the main thing wrong with history.
34. Team members most able to help the team quit the team or are reassigned.
35. The bus that was leaving as you arrived at the bus stop was your bus.
36. Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
37. Whenever a system becomes completely defined, someone will discover something that abolishes the system or expands it beyond recognition.
38. Your first night shift in the Emergency Room occurs on a night with a full moon.
39. Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.
40. If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
41. Eat a live toad first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
42. Needlessly disturbing a thing at rest is folly of the highest magnitude.
43. Nature lies.
44. Dust breeds.
45. Enough isn't.
46. First determine if you are between a dog and its lamppost.
47. Anyone who puts up with a lot of crap will receive more crap.
48. The opulence of an office's decor varies inversely with the fundamental competency of the person occupying the office.
49. An expert progressively learns more and more about less and less, and eventually knows everything about nothing.
50. The claim that the universe contains 300 billion stars is believable; assertions that a bench has wet paint on it must be tested.
51. All great discoveries are made by mistake.
52. If it's stupid and it works it isn't stupid.
53. A student who improves worked harder; a student whose performance declines has a poor teacher.
54. First draw the curve, then plot the reading.
55. Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
56. Don't worry about the bullet with your name on it; worry about the bullet addressed "To Whom it May Concern."
57. Genius cannot overcome preoccupation with detail.
58. Good students move away.
59. There is always an easier way.
60. Never tell your shift captain you have nothing to do.
61. Throwing something away guarantees its immediate usefulness.
62. Clearing all rooms without meeting any resistance means you kicked in the door of the wrong house.
63. The first myth of management is that it exists.
64. A failure cannot appear before the unit has passed its final inspection.
65. We don't know one millionth of one percent about anything.
66. Shift commanders, not God, establish shift priorities; there is a difference.
67. There is no free lunch.
68. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch (a.k.a. "tanstaafl")
69. A teacher who is late for class and does not meet the principal in the hall is late for a faculty meeting.
70. Complex questions have simple, easy to comprehend wrong answers.
71. Any given program, when running, is obsolete.
72. The faster a computer performs, the faster it will crash.
73. Next time you punch out a handcuffed prisoner for spitting on you, smile and look straight at the camera.
74. To the powerful wisdom is a sign of weakness; a wise person can lead without power, but only the powerful can lead without wisdom.
75. Thimk.
76. Eschew obfuscation.
77. Technology doesn't transfer.
78. Never reveal to a mechanical object that you are in a hurry.
79. A person who tortures animals and wets the bed is either a serial killer or works for internal affairs.
80. Everything is cold except what should be.
81. Unanimity is proof of cowardice and uncritical thought.
82. New students come from schools that teach nothing.
83. Hot glass looks exactly like cold glass.
84. Zeraralwazmanimororsezassezanzerareorses.
85. The breaking of eggs is no guarantee that an omelet worth eating will be created.
86. You get the most of what you need the least.
87. Things equal to nothing else are equal to each other.
88. Every group has its fool; if you are in a group, and are unable to identify its fool, you are it.
89. Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.
90. The fact that monkeys have hands should give us pause.
91. Universities cannot give students brains, but they can give them diplomas.
92. Tolerances accumulate.
93. Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down.
94. If there are twelve clowns in a ring, you can jump in and start reciting impeccable Shakespeare, but to that audience you will just be the thirteenth clown.
95. If it tastes good, you can't have it; if it tastes bad, you have to clean your plate.
96. The problem student is the child of a school board member.
97. You get faster service when the restaurant is full than when it is half empty.
98. Managers manage by the book, even when they don't know who wrote the book or even which book.
99. The function of a design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman.
100. The real expert predicts the job will take the longest and cost the most.
101. For every action there is a side effect.
102. If a thing cannot be fitted into another thing smaller than itself, someone will do it.
103. Coasting is the definition of going down hill.
104. Negative slack increases.
105. You travel fastest when traveling alone, but when you arrive you've nobody to share it with.
106. Never reveal what you wouldn't do.
107. Anything cut to length will be too short.
108. Anything that happens enough times to irritate will happen at least once more.
109. Eternal boredom is the price of constant vigilance.
110. It is impossible to determine how deep a puddle is without stepping into it.
111. Everything depends.
112. The effort required to effect a course correction increases geometrically with time.
113. Perfect stability is only achieved when all your time is spent doing nothing but reporting on the nothing you are doing.
114. Matt Syptak's Law: If a fuse is installed to protect a circuit, the circuit will blow to protect the fuse.
115. All complex circuit designs contain one obsolete part, two unobtainable parts, and three parts still under development.
116. All complex systems that work evolved from simple systems that work.
117. Any system dependent on human reliability is unreliable.
118. Under rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables an organism will behave as it pleases.
119. Nothing ever just goes away.
120. Good intentions combined with stupidity are impossible to outthink.
121. An object in motion is going in the wrong direction.
122. An object at rest is in the wrong place.
123. A shortcut is the longest distance between two points.
124. Assigning N persons to write a compiler produces an N-1 pass compiler.
125. All complicated systems or programs will, if examined from the right angle, become more complicated.
126. If you don't understand it, it is intuitively obvious.
127. In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct, beyond all need of checking, is the mistake.
128. The sweetness of the buyer's secretary varies directly with the odds that the competition already has the order.
129. The only perfect science is hindsight.
130. The real world is a special case.
131. A proliferation of laws always begets a proliferation of loop-holes.
132. If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
133. Whatever goes up must come down.
134. Dropped instruments roll to a least accessible corner.
135. Simple theories must be described using complex vocabularies.
136. If you build a system that even a fool can operate, only a fool will want to use it.
137. The degree of a project's technical competence is inversely proportional to the involvement of upper management.
138. Never share a foxhole with anyone braver than you are.
139. No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.
140. Not all cookies reside in jars.
141. All machines are amplifiers.
142. The most dangerous thing in a combat zone is a gung-ho officer with a map and half a brain.
143. The problem with taking the easy way out is that the enemy has already mined it.
144. The buddy system gives the enemy someone else to shoot at.
145. People do not change; they become more so.
146. The further you advance beyond your own positions, the greater the odds your artillery will fall short.
147. Incoming fire always has the right of way.
148. If your advance is going well, you are walking into an ambush.
149. The quartermaster has two sizes: too large and too small.
150. The crucial memorandum will be snagged by the paper clip on the overlying correspondence.
151. If you need a supervisor in a hurry, doze off.
152. Suppressive fire is most accurate when used on abandoned positions.
153. As the economy gets better, everything else gets worse.
154. Any non-trivial computer program contains at least one bug.
155. Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology: There's always one more bug.
156. Work flows to the competent member of the team until that member submerges.
157. Nobody who wants the presidency enough to spend two years organizing and campaigning for it can be trusted.
158. The only thing more accurate than incoming enemy fire is incoming friendly fire.
159. Don't be conspicuous; inside the combat zone, it draws enemy fire; outside the combat zone, it draws sergeants.
160. If your sergeant can see you, so can the enemy.
161. All the good ones are taken.
162. Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
163. If he or she isn't taken, there's a reason.
164. Deficiencies never surface during dry runs.
165. A distinguished, elderly scientist who states something is possible is usually right; a distinguished, elderly scientist who states something is impossible is usually wrong.
166. Brains x Beauty x Availability = 0.
167. It is always darkest just before the lights go out.
168. Everything that appears too good to be true is.
169. People often stumble over the truth, but most of the time they pick themselves up and continue on as though nothing happened.
170. Adding manpower to a late project makes it later.
171. Clearly stated instructions consistently produce multiple interpretations.
172. No matter which way you ride a bicycle, it's uphill against the wind.
173. It is always the wrong time of month.
174. If the research lavished on the female bosom was diverted to space exploration, hot-dog stands would prosper on the moon.
175. Information travels most efficiently to those with the least need to know.
176. All progress is based on a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
177. If everything is coming your way, you are in the wrong lane.
178. The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
179. It is impossible to produce a baby in one month by impregnating nine women.
180. Everything over the hill picks up speed.
181. Anything is possible; nothing is easy.
182. The vehicle in front travels slower.
183. History proves nothing.
184. The location of a drip bears no relation to the location of a roof leak.
185. It is harder to find a job than keep one.
186. A little humility is arrogance.
187. Stones in boots migrate to the point of greatest pressure
188. The weight of a backpack increases in direct proportion to the amount of food consumed from it; running out of food speeds the rate at which the pack's weight goes up.
189. Anyone can do any amount of work if it isn't the work they are supposed to be doing.
190. The number of stones in a boot is directly proportional to the number of hours on the trail.
191. A statement may be true independently of the illogical reasoning that created it.
192. The difficulty of finding a trail marker is directly proportional to the consequences of failing to find it.
193. Expenditures and revenues always seek the same level.
194. Guarding against the arbitrary is futile.
195. A lost object being sought is always found in the last place examined.
196. The remaining distance to a campsite remains constant as twilight approaches
197. The integral of the gravitational potential taken around any loop trail always comes out positive.
198. What's good politics is bad economics; what's bad politics is good economics; what's good economics is bad politics; what's bad economics is good politics
199. If it can be borrowed and it can be broken, you will borrow it and you will break it.
200. Death is nature's way of telling you to plan ahead.

1. The original Antithesis: If anything can go well, it will.
2. An early variant: Whatever can go well will go well, at the best possible time.
3. An early corollary: Nothing is as hard as it looks.
4. Everything takes less time than you think.
5. Whatever can go well will.
6. If several things can go well, expect the one that will produce the most good.
7. If there is a optimum time for something to go well, that is precisely when it will happen.
8. If something can't go well, it will anyway.
9. Given only four ways that a procedure can possibly go well, and a totally disastrous circumvention of all of them, a fifth will materialize.
10. Left to themselves, things always go from good to better.
11. If everything is going badly, something important has been overlooked.
12. Nature thrives on the undiscovered attribute.
13. The chance something is flawed is lower than you think; even fools often get it right.
14. Every problem leads to new inventions.
15. Occam's Razor: Most things on to-do lists are unneeded over-complications.
16. Enough research will uncover any fraud.
17. The legibility of a copy is proportional to its value.
18. Given a long road upon which a one-way bridge and few cars, traveling random courses, the chance that two cars traveling in opposite directions will meet at the bridge is remote.
19. Things get better when stress is relieved.
20. Poverty of choice produces a prosperity of disparate problem-solvers.
21. Any bus that can be the right bus might be; all your busses are in service, empty, and on time.
22. When it's time to quit, just quit; it's ok to call it a day.
23. Everything gets better all at once.
24. If you need six buttons, and you will find five in your button box, it's ok to change button styles.
25. After things go from good to even better, the cycle repeats itself.
26. Matter accrues worth in direct proportion to its value
27. Nature's perversity is also the source of its most wondrous beauty.
28. Paper is always strongest at its perforations.
29. Wash the floor, and watch your step, then don't worry which side the bread lands on when you drop it.
30. Murphy's antitheses are pessimistic.
31. Pick the best lane, and stick with it.
32. If there isn't a law, lobby to keep it that way.
33. That history repeats itself is the main thing good about history.
34. Team members most able to help the team gravitate to the team or are assigned to it.
35. The bus that is arriving as you arrive at the bus stop is your bus.
36. Informed logic is a systematic method of coming to the correct conclusion, confidently.
37. Whenever you define a system completely, enjoy it as long and as well as you can; evolution demands either its abolition or expansion beyond present recognition.
38. Your first night shift in the Emergency Room occurs on a night with a full moon.
39. Dominate technology by managing everything about it that you understand.
40. Write programs the way builders  build buildings, so the first team of critical analysts that comes along won't tear your program to shreds.
41. Eat a live toad first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
42. Leaving a thing at rest alone is wisdom of the highest magnitude.
43. Nature speaks eloquent truths.
44. Dustpans & brooms abound.
45. Enough is.
46. Understanding what your adversary needs most urgently solves the majority of your problems.
47. Anyone who solves lots of problems will be given lots of problems to solve.
48. The poverty of an office's decor varies inversely with the fundamental competency of the person occupying the office.
49. A true expert learns more and more about essential issues, and eventually knows enough to get the job done.
50. Take as given the claims that cannot be proven or disproved, but thoroughly test every claim that is amenable to critical examination.
51. All great discoveries are serendipitous.
52. If it's stupid and it works it isn't stupid.
53. A student who improves has a good teacher; a student whose performance declines isn't trying.
54. Plotted readings make readable curves.
55. Anything can be built on schedule, and on budget.
56. Those clothed in effective, well-tested armor, don't worry about bullets or the names that are written on them.
57. Genius and copious attention to the big picture always overcome.
58. Another's loss is your gain.
59. There is always an easier way.
60. If you do your job, on time, your shift captain will not mete out extra projects to you.
61. Putting stuff that's in the way up in the attic helps show which stuff isn't really in the way.
62. Clearing all rooms without meeting any resistance means you kicked in the door of the wrong house.
63. The first truth of management is that it isn't.
64. Once a unit has passed its final inspection, its failure will appear.
65. We don't know one millionth of one percent about anything.
66. Shift commanders, not God, establish shift priorities; there is a difference.
67. Buy your own lunch.
68. You can always buy your own lunch (a.k.a. "ycabyol")
69. A teacher who is early for class and does not meet the principal in the hall will also be early for the faculty meeting.
70. Simple questions don't need complex, hard to comprehend wrong answers.
71. Any given program, when running, is obsolete.
72. The faster a computer performs, the faster it will crash.
73. Next time you think of punching out a handcuffed prisoner for spitting on you, smile, think about the camera, and keep your cool.
74. To the weak wisdom gives strength; a wise person can lead without the need to exercise power.
75. Think.
76. K.I.S.S.
77. Technology transfers.
78. Know the limits of the mechanical objects you work with, and endeavor not to exceed them.
79. A person who tortures animals and wets the bed is either a serial killer or works for internal affairs.
80. Everything is cold except what should be.
81. Genius often stands alone.
82. New students bring new methods of teaching and learning.
83. Hot glass looks exactly like cold glass.
84. Zeraralwazmanimordoggibagzanzeraredoggiez.
85. The breaking of eggs always carries a hope that an omelet worth eating may be created.
86. You get the most good from what you have the least of.
87. Things equal to nothing else are equal to each other.
88. Every group has its genius; if you are in a group, and can't identify its genius, you are it.
89. Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.
90. The fact that monkeys have hands should give us pause.
91. Universities cannot give students brains, but they can give them diplomas.
92. Tolerances cancel.
93. Life is nature's way of telling you to invent something.
94. If there are twelve clowns in a ring, you can jump in and start reciting impeccable Shakespeare, but to that audience you will just be the thirteenth clown.
95. If it tastes good, you can't have it; if it tastes bad, you have to clean your plate.
96. The problem student is the child of a school board member.
97. You get faster service when the restaurant is full than when it is half empty.
98. Managers manage by the book, even when they don't know who wrote the book or even which book.
99. The function of a design engineer is to make things difficult for the fabricator and impossible for the serviceman.
100. The real expert predicts the job will take the longest and cost the most.
101. For every action there is a side effect.
102. If a thing cannot be fitted into another thing smaller than itself, someone will do it.
103. Coasting means letting gravity work for you.
104. Negative slack increases.
105. You travel slowest when traveling in a crowd, but when you arrive you've got lots of friends to share it with.
106. Never do what you wouldn't reveal.
107. Anything cut to length will be too short.
108. Anything that happens enough times to irritate will happen at least once more.
109. Constant vigilance is the price of eternal freedom.
110. It is possible to determine how deep a puddle is by stepping into it with one foot.
111. Everything depends.
112. The effort required to effect a course correction increases geometrically with time.
113. Perfect stability is only achieved when all your time is spent doing nothing but reporting on the nothing you are doing.
114. Matt Syptak's Law: If a fuse is installed to protect a circuit, the circuit will blow to protect the fuse.
115. All complex circuit designs contain one obsolete part, two unobtainable parts, and three parts still under development.
116. All complex systems that work evolved from simple systems that work.
117. Any system independent of human reliability is reliable.
118. Under rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables an organism will behave as it pleases.
119. Nothing ever just goes away.
120. Bad intentions combined with stupidity are always found out.
121. An object in motion is going in the wrong direction.
122. An object at rest is in the wrong place.
123. A shortcut is the longest distance between two points.
124. Assigning N persons to write a compiler produces an N-1 pass compiler.
125. All complicated systems or programs will, if examined from the right angle, become simple.
126. If you don't understand it, it is intuitively obvious.
127. In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct, beyond all need of checking, is the mistake.
128. The sweetness of the buyer's secretary varies directly with the odds that the competition already has the order.
129. Hindsight is foresight without a future.
130. The real world is a special case.
131. A new law begs the creation of a new loop-hole.
132. Just because an experiment fails doesn't mean everything has gone wrong.
133. Whatever goes up must come down.
134. Dropped instruments roll to a least accessible corner.
135. The more complex the vocabulary the simpler the theory.
136. If you build a system that even a fool can operate, only a fool will want to use it.
137. The degree of a project's technical competence is inversely proportional to the involvement of upper management.
138. Never share a foxhole with anyone braver than you are.
139. No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.
140. Not all cookies reside in jars.
141. All machines are amplifiers.
142. The most dangerous thing in a combat zone is a gung-ho officer with a map and half a brain.
143. The problem with taking the easy way out is that the enemy has already mined it.
144. The buddy system gives the enemy someone else to shoot at.
145. People do not change; they become more so.
146. The further you advance beyond your own positions, the greater the odds your artillery will fall short.
147. Incoming fire always has the right of way.
148. If your advance is going well, you are walking into an ambush.
149. The quartermaster has two sizes: too large and too small.
150. The crucial memorandum will be snagged by the paper clip on the overlying correspondence.
151. If you need a supervisor in a hurry, doze off.
152. Suppressive fire is most accurate when used on abandoned positions.
153. As the economy gets better, everything else gets worse.
154. Any non-trivial computer program contains at least one bug.
155. Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology: There's always one more bug.
156. Work flows to the competent member of the team until that member submerges.
157. Nobody who wants the presidency enough to spend two years organizing and campaigning for it can be trusted.
158. The only thing more accurate than incoming enemy fire is incoming friendly fire.
159. Don't be conspicuous; inside the combat zone, it draws enemy fire; outside the combat zone, it draws sergeants.
160. If your sergeant can see you, so can the enemy.
161. All the good ones are taken.
162. Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
163. If he or she isn't taken, there's a reason.
164. Deficiencies never surface during dry runs.
165. A distinguished, elderly scientist who states something is possible is usually right; a distinguished, elderly scientist who states something is impossible is usually wrong.
166. Brains x Beauty x Availability = 0.
167. It is always darkest just before the lights go out.
168. Everything that appears too good to be true is.
169. When you stumble, don't focus on picking yourself up and getting on as though nothing happened; focus on your surroundings, for you may have stumbled upon a truth.
170. Adding manpower to a late project makes it later.
171. Clearly stated instructions consistently produce multiple interpretations.
172. No matter which way you ride a bicycle, it's uphill against the wind.
173. It is always the wrong time of month.
174. If the research lavished on the female bosom was diverted to space exploration, hot-dog stands would prosper on the moon.
175. Information travels most efficiently to those with the least need to know.
176. All progress is based on a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
177. If nothing is coming your way, you are probably in the right lane.
178. The light at the end of the tunnel may actually be the end of the tunnel.
179. Never believe you can't nurture more than one seminal thought at once; perseveration can birth more than one seminal solution in the time that only one such solution ordinarily is arrived at; the human mind is a wondrous thing.
180. Everything over the hill picks up speed.
181. Anything can be easy; nothing is impossible.
182. The slow vehicle in front gives the fast car behind you somebody else to focus his anger on.
183. History proves everything, including the fact that history proves nothing.
184. The location of a drip bears no relation to the location of a roof leak.
185. It is easier to keep a job than find one.
186. A little arrogance is an oxymoron.
187. Stones in boots migrate to the point of greatest pressure
188. The weight of a backpack increases in direct proportion to the amount of food consumed from it; running out of food speeds the rate at which the pack's weight goes up.
189. Anyone can do any amount of work if it isn't the work they are supposed to be doing.
190. The number of stones in a boot is directly proportional to the number of hours on the trail.
191. A statement may be false independently of the logical reasoning that created it.
192. The difficulty of finding a trail marker is directly proportional to the consequences of failing to find it.
193. Expenditures and revenues always seek the same level.
194. Guarding against the arbitrary is futile.
195. A lost object being sought is always found in the last place examined.
196. The remaining distance to a campsite remains constant as twilight approaches
197. The integral of the gravitational potential taken around any loop trail always comes out positive.
198. What's good politics is bad economics; what's bad politics is good economics; what's good economics is bad politics; what's bad economics is good politics
199. If it can be borrowed and it can be broken, you will borrow it and you will break it.
200. Life is nature's way of telling you to plan ahead.