> As promised, I offer this draft of the Physical Laws and Natural
> Forces attendent to auto maintenance. This list is of course
> optimistically short, and only a few of the Great Mysteries are
> herein illuminated.
>
> The Law of Conservation of Defects: Every car has a preferred
> fault equilibrium which it strives to maintain. If for example
> a car has a defect stability level of 3, then there are always
> three things that don't work. As long as you don't fix any of
> them, the system will remain stable. Fix one, and another thing
> will instantly break the next time you drive it.
I further submit that the defect stability level is of type float,
not int...
Now, for our next collection, let's discuss the economics of British
cars. Fisher's First Law, as many list members no doubt recall, is:
By the time you can afford it, you can't afford it.
Or in more technical terms, dP > dS, where P = the price of the vehicle
in question and S = the amount in your savings account (or your salary,
depending on your circumstances). The simple case is that if, say, a
Caterham Seven costs on the average fifteen thousand dollars, then by
the time you accumulate fifteen thousand dollars to purchase the car,
its average price will be eighteen thousand dollars. I am engaged in
continued research to determine the exact ratio between dP and dS; I
am currently of the opinion that the ratio is variable, with an additional
term, W, indexed to the car's desirability in the eyes of the would-be
purchaser. As W increases, the ratio between dP and dS increases; a
minimum value for dP:dS appears to be roughly 1.2, with maximum values
as high as 4 and 5 during the inflationary period of the late Eighties.
What is perhaps most noteworthy about this law is its ability to
unify completely disparate pieces of physical reality in such a way
as to make one question Newton's repudiation of action at a distance.
Not only does Fisher's First Law apply to the rise in automobile prices
at a rate that just matches or exceeds one's rate of savings (or of
salary increase), but that should some stochastic process result in
a sudden increase in available cash, the Universe immediately adjusts
itself to make the purchase of the vehicle in question impossible,
either by demanding that the cash reserves be applied to some foolish
and temporary reward such as buying a home or paying taxes, or in
extreme circumstances, by the acquisition of every remaining known
instance of the desired vehicle by a mysterious offshore investor,
who spirits them off to a hermetically sealed, nitrogen-flushed bank
vault in Geneva.
Fisher's Second Law involves estimating the cost of any automotive
project, and is borrowed from the well-known universal metric conversion
formula [McKenzie, Douglas and McKenzie, Robert]:
Double it and add thirty.
Thirty is actually a percentage of the subtotal (not of the original
estimate, as some people interpret it). For instance, in a project with
an original estimate of $100, the actual cost according to Fisher's
Second Law will be no less than $260 -- $100 doubled is $200, and 30%
of that is $60. (Credit should go to Kim Fisher who first observed
this natural economic law while I was involved in getting my race car
built, again and again, for the 1991 SCCA racing season.)
What makes this law so noteworthy is, of course, that it is recursive.
That is, if you cost out a project to, say, $1000, then apply Fisher's
Second Law and allocate cash reserves of $2600, the actual cost will be
$5980 or more. This recursion has never been tested to more than one
level deep, as stack underflow halts the process (that is, the stack of
dollar bills on account at the bank).
I'm sure I have some more, but I'll have to think about them for a while.
Anyone else?
--Scott
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