Eponymous Laws

Godwin’s Law

Dictates that the longer a thread, the more likely someone will post a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler

Occam’s Razor

Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor) is a principle from philosophy. Suppose there exist two explanations for an occurrence. In this case the simpler one is usually better. If the legend is more credible than the truth then print the legend.

Olber’s paradox

The paradox that, if the universe consisted of an infinite number of stars equally distributed through space, then every line of sight would come from a star and the night sky would glow uniformly, which is observationally not true.

The Streisand effect...

is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet. which is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose 2003 attempt to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California, inadvertently drew further public attention to it. Similar attempts have been made, for example, in cease-and-desist letters to suppress numbers, files, and websites. Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity and media extensions such as videos and spoof songs, often being widely mirrored across the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks.

This list of eponymous laws provides links to articles on laws, theorems, principles, adages, and other succinct observations or predictions named after a person. In some cases the person named has coined the law – such as Parkinson's law – work expands to fill the time required for its completion. In others, the work or publications of the individual have led to the law being so named – as is the case with Moore's law. There are also laws ascribed to individuals by others, such as Murphy's law; or given eponymous names despite the absence of the named person.

Peter principle

His is the observation that, in an organizational hierarchy, every employee will rise or get promoted to his or her level of incompetence. The Peter Principle is based on the notion that employees will get promoted as long as they are competent, but at some point will fail to get promoted beyond a certain job because it has become too challenging for them. Employees rise to their level of incompetence and stay there. Over time, every position in the hierarchy will be filled by someone who is not competent enough to carry out his or her new duties.

Denis O’Brien: “I welcome the clarification of the Irish High Court ruling today. It vindicates the rights of elected representatives to raise matters of public concern and for those issues to be fairly reported in our media. It is vital for democracy that clarification was provided.’ Apply to Hibernianscribe if the reader comprehends this verbiage!