What's Your Law?

That's the Annual Edge Question for 2004.

Here are some of my favorite answers from smart people:

David Bunnell

Bunnell's First Law of Retrievability

Everything is retrievable.

Bunnell's Second Law of Retrievability

Everything is stored somewhere. The secret to retrieving things is simply finding out where they are stored.

Karl Sabbagh

Sabbagh's First Law

Never assume.

All the mistakes I have made in my life—not that there are that many, of course—have been because I failed to follow my own law.

Sabbagh's Second Law

The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred.

Irene Pepperberg

Pepperberg's Law of Comparative Cognition

Any behavior exhibited by young children that is taken as evidence of the early emergence of intelligence will, when subsequently exhibited by nonhumans, be interpreted by many humans as a set of simple stimulus-response associations lacking cognitive processing, whereas the stimulus-response explanation will rarely be used to re-interpret the behavior of the child.

Gotta start working on mine.
via [ Jack Hodgson ]