Pharos wrote: > This is the best source of the "zeroth law" of Wikipedia: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Raul654/Raul%27s_laws#Laws_by_others > > I believe people have tried to track down the original coiner, but > noone really knows. > > >
The "original" original of the concept itself is of course "The Flight of the Bumblebee", with a related concept being the centipede losing track of it's legs, when it begins trying to "think through" what it is doing with them. <old skool anecdote warning> In actual fact I employed this kind of formulation to rebut New Media pundit Teppo Turkki (think of him as the Finnish equivalent of Andrew Keene, and you won't go too far wrong) in a debate here in Finland, in the mid 1990's, on the subject of the future of the Internet. My opinion was that eventually, with the passage of time the Internet would not be "The Net of a Million Lies" anymore, at least in terms of any idea that had been debated exhaustively on the web, though new lies would regularly sprout of course. Teppo Turkki attempted to just completely pooh-pooh the very idea, saying "That might be the way it works in theory, but in practise... " To which I replied lightning fast that in fact, "It could never in fact work in theory, but practical experience has showed otherwise." </old skool> Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
