This week's E2MQ is about Razors and Laws

A well-known adage comes to us from William of Ockham, an early XIVth century English Franciscan friar and scholar.  Ockham's Razor* states, Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate, “Plurality must never be posited without necessity."  Basically, you'll do well by sticking with simplicity.

Another popular adage is Murphy's Law, sometimes referred to as, "The fourth law of thermodynamics," which states: "If anything can go wrong, it will."


We've pulled together a collection of 15 other adages, and you are challenged with connecting each with its author.  To make things more exciting, we're offering a couple of extra potential authors for these razors or laws.  But we've also put in a couple of easy ones so you won't get discouraged.  Also, hints will be provided on Twitter every day starting tomorrow.


See how many sources (list follows) you can correctly associate with each of these sayings:


1. War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means.
2. Those who are most moral are furthest from the problem.
3.  Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely.
4.  Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered;    there is only error to be exposed.
5.  Trust yourself.  You know more than you think you do.
6.  The quality of food in restaurants is in inverse proportion to the number of signed celebrity photographs on the walls.
7.  People become progressively less competent for jobs they once were well equipped to handle.
8.  History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely one they have exhausted all other alternatives.
9.  Nine-tenths of wisdom consists in being wise in time.
10. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it’s just possible that you haven’t understood the situation.
11. In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
12. Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
13. Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families.
14. If you give Congress a chance to vote on both sides of an issue, it will always do it.
15. If you can explain what you’re doing in simple English, you are probably doing something wrong.

You will find the sources in this list:

A.  Saul Alinsky

B.  Paul Armer

C.  Les Aspin

D.  Robert Benchley

E.  Fred Bucy

F.  Carl von Clausewitz

G.  Charles Dickens

H.  Abba Eban

I.   Ralph Waldo Emerson

J.  Aldous Huxley

K.  Alfred Kahn

L.  Jean Kerr

M.  H.L. Mencken

N.  Bryan Miller

O.  Laurence Peter

P.  Theodore Roosevelt

Q.  Benjamin Spock
R.  Adlai Stevenson

See how many you can get.  First with most wins this week's prize!




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*  Footnotes on Razors

The archaic term "razor" comes to us from the translation from German of "Ockhams Messer" -- Ockham's Knife, because William of O encourages shaving away unnecessary assumptions to get at the heart of the matter.

The first electric razor was patented in 1929 by Col. Jacob Schick, a US Army officer who conceived of the product while bedridden, recovering from dysentery, and unable to move to a sink for his daily shave.  Schick introduced to the market just over 80 years ago, on March 18th 1931.

Speaking of close shaves, to avoid an investigation by a Joint Congressional Committee on Tax Evasion & Avoidance, Schick skipped out of the U.S. in 1935 and became a Canadian citizen.  Before he died in 1937 Schick had transferred most of his wealth to a series of holding companies in the Bahamas.