Not the last place you look

Ever got really annoyed by Murphy's Laws? Do they bring back that adolescent desire to thumb your nose at authority? Well, now's your chance.

It is so very annoying that a lost or misplaced object is always in the last place one looks: whether one looks in the most likely, least likely, most-least likely or least-most likely place first it's never there - it's always somewhere else. One begins to wonder how Quantum Mechanics ever find anything to observe... but the Heisenbergian implications are interesting: if you really don't know where something is, it must be moving rather slowly, so it will probably pretty much stay where it is. On the other hand, as you get closer and closer to finding it, it ought to speed up - ah... that would account for it the difficulty... the zitterbewegung of Stuff means you end up having to run it down like a cheetah chasing an antelope.

[Note added in proof: for the benefit of those with a pincipled aversion to persistent German terminological hegemony we may thus coin a new, and dare I say more intuitive (to the Anglo-Saxons among us) term: subatomic or quantum pronking. I thank you.]

Anyway, now help is at hand. In order to avoid That Which Is Sought (TWIS) turning up at the end of a long and hitherto fruitless search you need to do only one simple thing, i.e. keep looking after you have found it.

One of these days I'm going to find TWIS twice.

So there. Yah-boo-sucks to Murphy - with knobs on.