My son is fond of encyclopedias, and he reads them almost every day.
From time to time he comes to me and tell the most interesting facts he has discovered.
Yesterday he came to me with a great desire to test himself and compare his speed with a cheetah!;))
What a crazy idea! But the thing is this experiment was proposed in one of his Nature books:)
They proposed to test what distance a kid would run for 10 sec.
This result should be multiply for 6, and then for 60 - we get distance that a kid can run for 1 hours.
If we divide it into 1000, we can get his own speed in km/hour.
And then we can compare the result with different animals.
When a kid see just numbers in the book, we can hardly imagine what it means in reality, and whether it's really fast or slow.
When he can try it by himself, it works the best, and thus all numbers are transformed into real and useful info than can be remembered easily.
So these book authors have given a brilliant experiment for kids, an d we have tried it;)
So Vlad ran 37m for 10 sec
That's what we've got:
So we've got 13,3 km/h - his own speed:)
And...a cheetah can run up to 100 km/h
a hare - 70 km/h
a kangaroo - 40 km/h
It was a cool and funny test! Now Vlad knows what speed is;)
That's great! What is really interesting is that I am not faster than Vlad, and every year I hunt stag, which can run at ~65kph, by running them down afoot. I can keep trotting on their trail all day long, but stags and hinds need to lay down to chew the cud ~8 hours a day. If I start on their trail early enough in the day, I can always catch up to them.
Persistence eventually outruns speed.
Thanks!
wow are you a hunter? a very patient hunter:) and a great note about speed and persistence;)
I am not so much patient as I am persistent. I was raised on an island in Alaska, where I learned from my earliest youth to hunt, fish, and forage for my supper. There was a long time after I left Alaska I did not hunt or fish anymore, but eventually I realized that, while it would be different, it was possible to hunt where there were logging roads, other people hunting, and for species different than I knew in my youth. It was challenging, but I learned to apply the skills I learned in my youth to different species and in different places.
It was in Oregon I learned to persistence hunt, as it wasn't necessary on the island where I grew up. I was very skeptical of the claim my friend made that we could outpace elk, but then he showed me we could, and I learned something very valuable about humanity and our strengths.
adventurous life you had!
And yeah, life is the best teacher, and the experience we can get is brilliant.
what, if it's not a secret?:)
We are alpha predators. That ability to persist, to outrun far speedier animals, is why we have controlled predators much larger and better naturally armed than ourselves, the Cave Bears, Lions, Tigers, and Hyenas we have competed with for hundreds of millennia, during which our best weapons weren't the pointy sticks we poked them with, but our capacity to outthink and outplan our would be predators, our competition for primacy in the natural environment.
Even unarmed and naked we are far more dangerous than lions or tigers, because we won't stay unarmed and naked, but will think and plan furiously until we are competent against such predators.