Murphy’s Law is usually stated as “if anything can go wrong, it will.”¹ Yet somehow, Murphy is not a major character on The Simpsons. This seems surprising (he could at least be an occasional patron at Moe’s or an irregular customer at the Kwik-E-Mart) since mishaps involving, well, just about everything are a long-standing tradition in The Simpsons. In this essay I want to focus on mishaps involving technology, or more precisely, artifacts that were designed by people to be used by other people. This obviously includes a wide array of things, from dolls to trains to nuclear power plants. It does exclude a great many other classes of misadventure, though, such as those involving elephants, mobsters, lightning strikes, sexy coworkers, deals with Satan for a doughnut² and the like. The discipline devoted to the study of human interaction with technology is termed human factors. People in human factors are, as often as not, psychologists. Obviously—or maybe not so obviously based on some of the e-mail I get—these psychologists are not of the “lie on the couch and tell me about your mother” variety. Human factors professionals are concerned with understanding human capabilities and limitations and applying that understanding to the design and operation of technological systems. This involves everything from biomechanics (i.e., the physics of muscles and bones) to human cognition, including perception, memory, decision-making and so on. The dominant backgrounds of human factors people are therefore in psychology and engineering (generally industrial engineering). Many human factors-oriented programs in  …