Some "laws"

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated Fri, 26 Mar 2004 18:21:24 -0500,  Sean Fitzpatrick
<grendel.jjf at VERIZON.NET> writes:

>  In the early '70s, WRC-TV in Washington, DC. interviewed me at some
>  length for the local evening news.  I was referred to as "Sean
Fitzgerald".
>
>  I immediately formulated this law:  "In any news story about which you
>  have personal knowledge or direct experience, you will find errors".  I
>  would call it Fitzger...Fitzpatrick's Law, but a few years later I read
>  of a journalist who had already formulated the same observation.   For
>  some reason it has not been enshrined in the Journalism Hall of Fame.

In mathematics there is
<quote>
BOYER'S LAW appears in H. C. Kennedy, "Boyer's Law: Mathematical formulas and
theorems are usually not named after their original discoverers," Amer. Math.
Monthly, 79:1 (1972), 66-67.

Boyer's theorem is found in 1968 in History of Mathematics by Barnabas
Hughes.
</quote>
(note to Fred Shapiro: Hughes is on the Historia Matematica list, should you
wish to contact him)

quoted from "Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of Mathematics (B) at
URL
http://members.aol.com/jeff570/b.html

A somewhat different "law"

Bill Lyon, "From Where the Hawks sit, the view is sweet indeed" _Philadelphia
Inquirer_ March 25, 2004, page H8 (this is the jump page for the article)
column 1

<quote>
    Tip-off, as mandated by CBS-TV, which controls sports with the same cold
buy-and-sell ruthlessness of a street-corner pimp, is set for 9:57.  This
inviting time, by the way, almost automatically assures that the first game,
Pitt-Oklahoma State, will be, oh say, triple overtime.  (This is known as Koppett's
Law:  Whatever will invonvenience the greatest number is what will happen.
Ergo, the second game will be going on past the bewitching hour.)
</quote>

I have never heard of "Koppett's Law" before, but some of you New Yorker
types may have, since I believe Koppett is a well-known New York sportswriter.
This quote is of course yet one more variation on Murphy's Law, and oddly is
closer to what I once read (in a long-forgotten source) was Murphy's original
version, something to the effect that "when something fail, it will fail in the
most disastrous way possible".

"bewitching hour"??

              - James A. Landau

Never meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with
ketchup

PS.  I don't know if it still be true, but in my father's generation
reporters were taught that misspelling a person's name was a mortal sin.  Newspaper
style books would include instructions such as to insert "(correct)" after an
unusual spelling of a name, e.g. "Peter Samson (correct)..."

If misspelling a name is such a sin, then what can we say about giving
someone the wrong surname...

Which brings up one more "law", actually a didactic proverb used to warn
reporters about mispelling names.  I have seen this stated once or twice, in
long-forgotten sources, but never with someone's name attached:

"The person who gets his name misspelled in print is not Zbignew Brzezinski
but Jon Smythe"