Murphy's law

You might have heard about the skydiver who plans to go to the edge of space and skydive to earth to set a new high altitude record...he plans to jump out at 24 miles, and the article notes:

The record for highest leap was set in 1960 by a U.S. Air Force test pilot, at just under 20 miles.

ah, and the story of that dive is here, along with how it resulted in the coining of Murphy's law...

During one of the early tests of these so-called strain gauges....returned no data. Now, when the military goes to the trouble to fire a chimp down a railroad spur using a rocket engine, they aren’t exactly thrilled with a null result. It turns out that the technical assistant who installed Murphy’s prototype instruments wired the gauges in backward.

Now, here’s where the recriminations start, as Murphy and his compatriots didn’t get along that well. Murphy reputedly blamed his assistant, stating, “If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will.”

Meanwhile, the other project staff blamed Murphy for failing to check and calibrate the sensors before the test, conjuring up their own sarcastic Murphy’s Law, which held that “If it can happen, it will happen.” Murphy’s Law became part of the project’s lore.