Sod, whose number's up?

By Richard Woolveridge
October 7, 2004

So just how good is the Murphy's or Sod's Law formula?

To test it on a special Australian event, was too late to run it over the prospects of Michael Clarke scoring a century in his first Test against India today (he was knocking the ball all over Bangalore as we were struggling to find a colleague with the ability to do a sum more complex than counting change in the canteen).

So we decided to see how the formula might apply to John Howard and Mark Latham and which Murphy's Law was most likely to affect on Saturday.

We asked Emeritus Professor Derek Robinson of the Australian National University to complete the formula for both leaders.

When he stopped laughing, Professor Robinson pointed out that the future of the country might have to wait as he had a bus to catch in 20 minutes.

But within a matter of minutes he had completed the formula ((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10)).

In the calculation, five factors have to be assessed: urgency (U), complexity (C), importance (I), skill (S) and frequency (F) and each given a score between one and nine. A sixth, aggravation (A), was set at 0.7 by the experts after their poll.

For urgency, complexity, and importance, the professor gave both Howard and Latham 9; for skill he gave Howard 9 and Latham 5 (since the Prime Minister has had more experience at the job than the Opposition Leader), and for frequency, Howard 4 and Latham 1.

Professor Robinson then:

1 Added the urgency, importance and complexity figures together

2 Subtracted the skill figures this from 10

3 Multiplied trhe answers to 1 and 2 and divided them by 20

4 Divided frequency numbers by 10

5. Rate the sine (or sin) of the answer to step 4 and subtracted this from 1

6 Divided 1 by the answer to step 5

7 Multiplied the answer to step 3 by 0.7 and multiplied this by the answer to step 6, which gave Latham 4.23 and Howard 5.6.

The closer to 10 the number, the higher the risk of falling victim to Sod's Law - which means Murphy's on Latham's side.

Asked what other use he could use the formula for, the rapidly calculating Professor Robinson shot back: "I think  George Bush and John Kerry will be next to work it out."

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