From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Sun Aug 20 2000 - 09:25:39 MDT
Amara Graps wrote:
> The following is my very strangest Internet-name experience.
>
> Three years ago, a woman at a department at the Carolinas HealthCare
> System in Charlotte, NC, wrote me, in quest of some background information
> for a quotation that the Vice President made in a presentation. The V.P.
> found the quotation in material he had from his previous job at
> a management consultant company: Ernest and Young.
>
> The women told me that the quotation is called "Amara's Law":
>
> "In reacting to change, there is a tendency to overestimate the
> impact of change in the short run and underestimate its long term impact."
<blinkblink> I've heard of "Amara's Law" - exactly that phrasing, too.
I never made the connection to the Amara on this list.
> I thought: HOLY-MOLEY!! (as Batman says). This quotation was taken
> from a post I made to the sci.physics Usenet group 1 1/2 years earlier,
> about the "Physics of Traffic Flows", where I said:
>
> "One rule-of-thumb in responding to any stimulus that one does not want to
> become unstable is: the longer one waits in response to a stimulus, the
> strength of that response should be exponentially less with respect to
> that time."
Ne, but that's not a short, snappy sound bite, so why shouldn't people
mess with it 'til they can remember it? ^_^; (Yeah, I know, it has
little to do with why you posted it, but *still*...)
> So my Usenet post surfaces in a slightly different way as "Amara's Law"
> in a management department in a health care company in South Carolina?!!
> (EEEK)
The context I heard of it in is wide-spread/generic use. For example,
http://www.byte.com/column/BYT19990928S0001
> I gave the woman my post that began the whole
> thing,(http://www.amara.com/ftpstuff/traffic.txt), I asked her
> to please get the attribution right (to Elliot Montroll), and
> then I asked myself whether it was time to quit Usenet.
>
> So you see Eli, Real Life is Stranger than Fiction.
Are you sure that you're the Amara it's attributed to? Granted, "Amara"
is not the most common of names, but it could have been put out by
another Amara.
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