Smeed's law

en.wikipedia.org

33 points·nice1··5 comments

I think that people in low-population areas often drive more recklessly because they assume that nobody else will be on the road, and they're usually right. (And they tend to have a larger distance to go to get to anything interesting).

Have we invented psychohistory yet?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)

Dyson's quote said, "Smeed interpreted his law as a law of human nature."

If this is true, then this formula should appear outside the world of driving. Has it been applied anywhere else? I did a quick search and found nothing.

I wonder if it applies to flying, rail travel, employment related fatalities, medical related fatalities, etc...

interesting...I wonder if there is a similar law for Internet traffic. Is the overall network congestion is determined by the amount of "sluggishess" (appropriately defined) that the average user experiences?

Back in the dialup days, waiting for a web page to load for over 1 minute was about it. More than that, and one would either move on or treat the medium different: for example, instead of interacting with the webpage, one would set it to load and go do something else, and come back later. Or give up. There was an alternative, though: going down to the internet cafe to get fast access.

The existence of the alternative affected one's perception of the "slowness", just as being stuck in traffic in LA made me wish for a proper subway system.

No quantification, just anecdotal observations.

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