Don wrote:It may be that we, or some other animal, is the most energy efficient creature on the earth. I wonder if you compute how much food (calorie energy) is required per pound per mile, which creature is the most efficient?
I'm not sure about the mechanism, but humans actually lose a lot of muscle tissue during long distance running. So it's not only calories that we are burning, but we are burning proteins from our own muscles. The catch is that in running state it's very hard if not impossible to recover lost carbs (you can eat a lot of sugar but your body will not process it sufficiently while running), so you have to burn proteins. And humans seem to be particularly good at it.
Also humans are the only animal that can drink or eat while running. All other animals have to stop to do that .
Don wrote:
I remember reading years ago in some magazine that humans were the fastest non-flying creatures on the planet - when considering long distances. I'm not sure I buy that, but the argument had to do with the idea that we could shed heat better than animals. Dogs have to lose heat mostly through their tongues for instance.
I also do not buy it.
Most humans cannot run long distances(like 40 kilometer)
without stopping in the middle.
Humans who can do it are minority who did special hard training for running long distances and I wonder how many animals did special training for this task.
Don wrote:
I remember reading years ago in some magazine that humans were the fastest non-flying creatures on the planet - when considering long distances. I'm not sure I buy that, but the argument had to do with the idea that we could shed heat better than animals. Dogs have to lose heat mostly through their tongues for instance.
I also do not buy it.
Most humans cannot run long distances(like 40 kilometer)
without stopping in the middle.
Humans who can do it are minority who did special hard training for running long distances and I wonder how many animals did special training for this task.
Most humans are easily capable of running 40 kilometer with training assuming their weight is normal - it's just that our society is insanely fat and out of shape, especially in the United States but it's happening in Europe and everywhere else too with each passing year I have noticed.
Our society is just not based on being able to move long distances on foot but that is the only thing preventing this ability. It's in us, it's just completely dormant for most people. For the past century or two we have had motorized vehicles to move our fat butts around.
Animals may not explicitly train for running long distances, but in the wild it's a way of life for them. So even if they did train it would not add a significant amount of additional conditioning.
Don wrote:
I remember reading years ago in some magazine that humans were the fastest non-flying creatures on the planet - when considering long distances. I'm not sure I buy that, but the argument had to do with the idea that we could shed heat better than animals. Dogs have to lose heat mostly through their tongues for instance.
I also do not buy it.
Most humans cannot run long distances(like 40 kilometer)
without stopping in the middle.
Humans who can do it are minority who did special hard training for running long distances and I wonder how many animals did special training for this task.
The claim is that many of the features in human evolution that distinguish us from our closest relatives (chimps and bonobos) seem to be specifically geared towards endurance running (sweating, lack of hair, large Achilles tendons, rotating hips that allow the torso to counter-rotate to neutralize angular momentum while running...). The manufacturing of weapons that can be used to kill an animal from a distance is a very recent development. For a few million years before that, it is plausible that humans mostly hunted by chasing an animal, forcing it to gallop for hours until it died of overheating (or was so weak that it was easy to kill). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting.
Nowadays very few people can run great distances, but this might be because our lifestyle doesn't involve persistence hunting. In the groups that do hunt this way (e.g. the Tarahumara and the Kalahari bushmen), most people can run great distances.
Don wrote:
I remember reading years ago in some magazine that humans were the fastest non-flying creatures on the planet - when considering long distances. I'm not sure I buy that, but the argument had to do with the idea that we could shed heat better than animals. Dogs have to lose heat mostly through their tongues for instance.
I also do not buy it.
Most humans cannot run long distances(like 40 kilometer)
without stopping in the middle.
Humans who can do it are minority who did special hard training for running long distances and I wonder how many animals did special training for this task.
Most humans are easily capable of running 40 kilometer with training assuming their weight is normal - it's just that our society is insanely fat and out of shape, especially in the United States but it's happening in Europe and everywhere else too with each passing year I have noticed.
Our society is just not based on being able to move long distances on foot but that is the only thing preventing this ability. It's in us, it's just completely dormant for most people. For the past century or two we have had motorized vehicles to move our fat butts around.
Animals may not explicitly train for running long distances, but in the wild it's a way of life for them. So even if they did train it would not add a significant amount of additional conditioning.
I used to bird (quail) hunt a lot with my dad. We had various bird dogs that were trained to respond to hand signals, and they kept up a steady lope all day long except when slowing down to track birds. A dog lopes along faster than a human jogs at a marathon pace. But then again, the dogs had lots of training exercise during the Summer to be ready for bird season. I do not believe humans can cover more ground unless you pick a seriously old and lazy dog and compare to a trained marathon runner...
bob wrote:I do not believe humans can cover more ground unless you pick a seriously old and lazy dog and compare to a trained marathon runner...
Hunting dogs are a special breed like pro human runners.
We are not talking here about 6-8km/h jogging pace that most recreational runners do. We are talking about 20km/h real marathon running pace.
There is no dog that can do 40km in 2 hours in summer heat. No dog at all.
Humans are also champions of will. No animal running for its life can achieve what humans can only for prestige.
Marathon in just over 2hours, double marathon in under 5 hours, 100km in 6 and a half hours, 200km in under 15 hours...
There's almost no limit in human feats of strength.
I wonder if my language was clear enough when trying to describe the example for progress, so I will give a simple position based example.
[D]r1bqk1nr/pppp1ppp/2n5/2b1p3/2B1P3/5N2/PPPP1PPP/RNBQK2R w KQkq - 4 4
Bf1 is not a move worth considering to us humans, but how is a computer also able to determine this? It has to 'look'. A computer can not look at the board like a human does. It has to use search. We already use a reduced null-move search to look at Bf1 and we do determine this way that Bf1 deserves no further attention. But, can this be improved upon? Well, if all the moves that would be rejected by an even more shallow null-move search were played two at a time then a null-move search on top of that preformed still did not lead to an improved eval then it should be safe to prune.
So, in the above diagram, Bf1 combined with Ng1, Ng5 or Nh4 etc., cannot recommend Bf1 then Bf1 is not worth looking at further as no progress can even be threatened with that move.
If you are on a sidewalk and the covid goes beep beep
Just step aside or you might have a bit of heat
Covid covid runs through the town all day
Can the people ever change their ways
Sherwin the covid's after you
Sherwin if it catches you you're through
Don wrote:
I remember reading years ago in some magazine that humans were the fastest non-flying creatures on the planet - when considering long distances. I'm not sure I buy that, but the argument had to do with the idea that we could shed heat better than animals. Dogs have to lose heat mostly through their tongues for instance.
I also do not buy it.
Most humans cannot run long distances(like 40 kilometer)
without stopping in the middle.
Humans who can do it are minority who did special hard training for running long distances and I wonder how many animals did special training for this task.
Most humans are easily capable of running 40 kilometer with training assuming their weight is normal - it's just that our society is insanely fat and out of shape, especially in the United States but it's happening in Europe and everywhere else too with each passing year I have noticed.
Our society is just not based on being able to move long distances on foot but that is the only thing preventing this ability. It's in us, it's just completely dormant for most people. For the past century or two we have had motorized vehicles to move our fat butts around.
Animals may not explicitly train for running long distances, but in the wild it's a way of life for them. So even if they did train it would not add a significant amount of additional conditioning.
I used to bird (quail) hunt a lot with my dad. We had various bird dogs that were trained to respond to hand signals, and they kept up a steady lope all day long except when slowing down to track birds. A dog lopes along faster than a human jogs at a marathon pace. But then again, the dogs had lots of training exercise during the Summer to be ready for bird season. I do not believe humans can cover more ground unless you pick a seriously old and lazy dog and compare to a trained marathon runner...
That matches my experience with Cogi, the boxer who ran circles around me when I was well conditioned and I usually finished in the top 10% of the 10k and half marathons I ran in the 70's.
But I'm not sure you realize how fast the marathoners run. I looked at several world record times for various distances, and computed the pace and the world record marathon pace is faster than almost all high school male runners can run 1 lap around the track or 400 meters. It works out to doing a lap every 72 seconds - for over 100 laps. Even though good runners can do this in less than a minute, probably only 1 kid in 20 can beat 72 seconds.
This is not a casual pace and so a reasonable healthy kid could not keep up with a marathoner for more than a few seconds.
When you are hunting you are not covering ground like a marathoner - not even close.
Milos wrote:Humans are also champions of will. No animal running for its life can achieve what humans can only for prestige.
Marathon in just over 2hours, double marathon in under 5 hours, 100km in 6 and a half hours, 200km in under 15 hours...
There's almost no limit in human feats of strength.
So you don't believe that a coyote that runs free out west, runs constantly, can't keep up with a human? They are all leg and lungs, humans carry a lot of excess baggage around (we only use two extremities, not all 4 to run...)
I'm not an expert on this topic by any means, but it certainly seems unlikely that a human is capable of beating animals that are many times stronger and better adapted to running...
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