Using Sod’s Law to control the weather

Let me explain.

My office window gets direct sunlight in the afternoon—if, that is, it is sunny outside. When it does, it casts a glare on my computer screen, in which case, I pull down the blinds.

But (in accordance with Sod’s Law), the moment I do that, the sun no longer has fun casting a glare on my screen—so it tends to go away.

So I pull up the blinds again—and sure enough, the sun returns (67.3% of the time—significantly more than the 50-50% of it happening by chance).

So I put the blinds down again. And the same thing repeats.

Over time, I realised that I can use this to encourage the sun to come out more—which, I’m happy to report, I have done, with significant success, for the past five winters. Having rainy, overcast skies day after day (as autumns and winters tend to be in our part of the world) can be soul-sapping, so having a reasonably effective method of keeping them in check has been extremely useful.

Of course, boring, logically-minded people—you know, the sort who think that a drawing of a boa constrictor that has swallowed an elephant is a hat—point out that this is mere superstition on my part; that my opening and closing of blinds cannot possibly have a causal impact on the weather; and that any success that I appear to have is merely down to coincidence and/or my subjective impressions.

I retort that if a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can cause a tornado in another,  my belief in the comparatively mild and localised effects of my blinds operations is entirely reasonable.

In fact, if my blinds operations are not 90% or 100% effective, it is because at any given moment, it is countered by someone else who is pulling their blinds up or down the other way.

Needless to say, I’ve been reluctant to publicise my findings until now, because—Sod’s Law—the moment I bring it to the attention of the wider world, it will probably cease to work.  But my curiosity has got the better of me, and in these days of increasingly erratic weather, we need every tool we can get to mitigate the extreme vagaries of climate.

What say you?