[Orcnet] The law of screws

[Keith Lofstrom]

Whenever I take something apart then reassemble it, I invariably have
either screws left over, or holes left over.  I believe there are
Cosmic Forces at work.  Today I was rebuilding my sister's CRT monitor.
Two screws missing out of 16.  A couple of weeks ago I was rebuilding
a copier:  four screws left over, out of 64 or so. 

>From these two data points, I have constructed Lofstrom's Screw Law:

   Screws Left Over = +/- sqrt( Screws to Remove  ) / 2 .  

Savvy statisticians will note that this is the formula for the standard
deviation of the probability of N items with probability 0.5.  The
surplus/missing screws are certainly deviant!

Since screws left over must be an integer, this implies that the number
of screws that must be removed to fix something is given by the formula
for Lofstrom's Screw Corollary:

  Screws to Remove = 4 * (Screws Left Over ) ^ 2

And so must be 0, 4, 16, 36, 64, ...  Screws not removed, or removed
in excess of these specific values are unnecessary to actually fix
something.  For example,  if you find yourself repairing a unit with
one visible screw,  you will have 3 ( or 15, or 35, ...) more screws
to remove inside.  Alternately,  you should leave ALL the screws
alone and fix the unit in software.

I look forward to more anecdotal evidence in support of Lofstrom's
Screw Law, and will ignore all apparently contradictory evidence.
Some scientists may scowl at this approach, but their overreliance
on evidence and facts will never get THEM elected President!

Keith  :-)

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs