Journal 11 - Aphorism

"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." That is Murphy's Law and is absolutely true (hence the law suffix as opposed to a theory). Those short eight words summarize so much in life. While the aphorism is a law of physics, it still applies to real life. Last year in Principles of Engineering (POE) we made a marble sorter out of Fischertechniks. The programming was sound as well as all of our mechanical parts and hopper. In theory everything should have been fine and dandy. In our test runs, my group encountered no major problems with the sorting and everything was working as it should. But of course, when the time came for the sorting to be graded, the marble sorter had glitches and funny things happened. Mr. Conklin and the rest of the class knew that my group's sorter works, as they had seen it many times before. But as Murphy;s Law states, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Our sorter developed a temper and any time Mr. Conklin came near it with a clip board and rubric, the marbles got stuck on the track, the arms did not go up and down properly, the light sensor read the marble as a wrong color. But as soon as we fixed things and ran it again it was fine. At least until the rubric came near it.

One of my favorite ancient aphorisms is "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts". I have read the Iliad several times and in it Laocoön said the aforementioned aphorism. Homer technically wrote it down, but both share credit. In the Iliad the Greeks brought a large wooden horse, a Trojan horse, in front of the gates of Troy. Of course the Greek soldiers led by Odysseus were inside of the horse, waiting until the Trojans were sleeping to attack, but no one listen to poor Laocoön. In the book that I am reading, The Son of Neptune, Greek and Roman demigods meet for the first time in centuries. One of the Romans warned, "beware of Greeks bearing gifts" when a large floating ship, the Argo II, flew over their camp. I thought it was ironic that I was reading about aphorisms while learning about them in English.