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My favorite is called 'Manipulating Murphys Law'. One example: A box with 150 cover screws, just repaired. You put in 149 screws, test it, then put in the final screw. If you put all the screws in first, it will surely fail.
Hanlon’s Razor (“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”)
Jane’s Law (“The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.”)
Sudden Deceleration Syndrome
And a great quote from Jane Austen that I can’t find, wherein a vicar describes the behavior of his betrothed when she discovers he is not receiving a large inheritance:
“She found that her affections had been transferred elsewhere”.
Also the word “dysphemism” (the opposite of euphemism) is wonderful in and of itself. Like calling one’s wife “the old ball and chain”
Not to mention the term and the practice of Apophasis.
LATE UPDATE: I forgot my favorite behavioral phenomenon that describes so much about Internet forums, politics, and audiophiles: “Inward Apologetics” in which people have to profess believing in obviously false ideas in order to demonstrate their tribal loyalty.
ahhhhhmmm... this one is a little abstruse, but for some reason reading the last page or so of this thread* brought one from my specific line of work to mind.
The Lobry de Bruyn Alberda van Ekenstein Transformation.
This is an important base-catalyzed chemical reaction in carbohydrate chemistry; the inversion of configuration of a chiral carbon atom in a reducing sugar. The full names of the two scientists who are immortalized here are Cornelis Adriaan Lobry van Troostenburg de Bruyn and Willem Alberda van Ekenstein.
It's a cool name for some cool chemistry.
So -- yeah -- sugars are unstable in alkali... but sometimes they are stable enough (i.e., if one works quickly enough) to exploit high-pH conditions to play some interesting analytical tricks to get some insight into the notoriously subtle structural variation possible in oligo- and polysaccharides.
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* and, just to be clear - and not to brown-nose - I am really enjoying this thread/topic!
Diworsification - is a term used to describe an investment portfolio that has been over-diversified, or diversified to the point of inefficiency. It can also refer to a company that has diversified too much through acquisitions.
The term "diworsification" was coined by Peter Lynch in his 1989 book One Up on Wall Street.
Lynch originally used the term to describe companies that diversified too much through acquisitions.
Fritz Zwicky referred to people whom he did not like as "spherical bastards", because, as he explained, they were bastards no matter which way one looked at them.
Fictional Creation from "The Crying of Lot 49" by Thomas Pynchon. A machine that would deploy a Maxwell's Demon to create energy:
" . . . the Nefastis Machine contained an honest-to-God Maxwell's Demon. All you had to do was to stare at the photo of Clerk Maxwell, and concentrate on which cylinder, right or left, you wanted the Demon to raise the temperature in. The air would expand and push a piston. The familiar Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge photo, showing Maxwell in right profile, seemed to work best."
Fictional Creation from "The Crying of Lot 49" by Thomas Pynchon. A machine that would deploy a Maxwell's Demon to create energy:
" . . . the Nefastis Machine contained an honest-to-God Maxwell's Demon. All you had to do was to stare at the photo of Clerk Maxwell, and concentrate on which cylinder, right or left, you wanted the Demon to raise the temperature in. The air would expand and push a piston. The familiar Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge photo, showing Maxwell in right profile, seemed to work best."
Zipf's Law and Zipfian distributions. Great name and cool empirical law about language and other human generated constructs.
The Great Vowel Shift: why modern English in movies set in the middle ages is just wrong....
Genetic algorithms: The pure intersection of evolutionary biology and mathematics in a single phrase--and a very cool approach to problem solving. I've drafted a number of patents for clients with GA based inventions--I had fun with this one. And closer to home, they were used by Tim Perry to find his optimized step diffuser A1-LF (0,4,5,3,5,5,0). I recently built one of these, with several more under construction.
And I'm surprised no one mentioned these two, given that this is Audio Science Review:
Psychoacoustics: The scientific name for when your dad yelled at you when you blasted Zeppelin in your bedroom: "What's the crazy noise you're listening to?!"
Quadratic residue diffuser. Sounds like what a mathematician's dog leaves behind.
Schismogenesis.
Observed here, most likely to occur in long threads involving cables, DACs and vinyl (and speakers, and amps, and bitrates, and audible measurements and the list goes on... )
