“The Science of Murphy’s Law: Life’s Little Annoyances Are Not As Random As They Seem: the Awful Truth Is That the Universe Is against You”, 1997-04-01 (; similar):
[Popularization of Matthews’s other articles on physics & statistics and what truth there is to “Murphy’s law”]:
Toast falling butter side up: true, because tables are not high enough for toast to be likely to complete one or more rotations before landing given the tilt & falling off edges, therefore toast will in fact tend to land on its top half.
Maps putting things on edges: true—printed paper maps tend to be hard to use because the place one wants to go will tend to be toward an edge; this is simply a geometric fact due to most of the area of a volume being towards the edge.
Other Checkout Lines Being Faster: true, because of anthropics, as most waiting time is spent in the slowest line; even if equally loaded, order statistics points out there is only a 1 in n chance that one picked the fastest line out of n lanes
Mismatched Socks: also true, simply because there are many more ways for socks in a pair to go missing than to go missing in pairs or match up
Raining: forecasts are fairly accurate, but this ignores base-rates and that much of that accuracy is due to predicting non-rain. It’s a version of the diagnostics/screening paradox:
For example, suppose that the hourly base rate of rain is 0.1, meaning that it is 10× more likely not to rain during your hour-long stroll. Probability theory then shows that even an 80% accurate forecast of rain is twice as likely to prove wrong as right during your walk—and you’ll end up taking an umbrella unnecessarily. The fact is that even today’s apparently highly accurate forecasts are still not good enough to predict rare events reliably.
[Keywords: socks, maps, umbrellas, family law, combinatorics, weather forecasting, technology law, mathematical constants, physics, probability theory]