So, the weather’s quite strange. On friday and saturday, it was mid 50s… I was Tshirting it like it was summer. Sunday? 20s-30s and 4 inches of snow. It took 10 minutes to get Aly’s car uncovered this morning.
So, it’s the beginning of the end of the begining. This is the start of my transition semester; I will be in 2 geology classes and two education classes. I’m taking a class in tectonic geomorph and well logging in geology, and inclusion and literacy in education. The ed classes seem pretty worthless and hippie-ish, but I got to do it sometime if I want to teach. Oh well, I’ll get it over with.
12 years ago today, I was really excited. My friend Shawn and his dad had just built a hockey net out of PVC, in which I would goaltend. It was gonna be great. We had the day off (MLK holiday) so we’d play street hockey all day. I woke up at about midnight after a bad dream, with a headache. In my dream, I was thrown from the top bunk of my bunk bed by an earthquake. I got out of bed, went to take some aspirin, and went back to sleep. My next memory was at 4:31 AM, when I was in the Mw 6.7 Northridge Earthquake. I grabbed my bed, hoping to not fly off. Well, my bed never tipped over, but I was still scared. I looked over at the clock to see what time it was, but the power was out, I assumed. Little did I know that the dresser that my clock sat on was halfway across the room on threw floor. My mom called for my brother and I, at which point my brother ran to her room. Her door had been jammed but came open after some effort. We gathered ourselves together and went outside to see the damage. At first, when we opened the front door, we saw that the porch was 2 feet above the base of the door, and we could not open the screen door to get out. We went around to the side door, and saw the stairs were 2 feet apart from the door. We lived in a mobile home, and it had fallen off it’s stilts. My mom saw her best friend across the street. His house was on fire. We ran back into our house to get water to put it out, but it was too late. He ran back inside for some baby pictures before they were lost. As he did, someone stole his wallet out of his jacket that he left outside. My mom, brother, and I grabbed what little we could, got in the car, and drove away to the orange light of the fire. The was the first of 61 other homes that burned, including Shawn’s. My two other friends in the neighborhood moved away in fear (one to Palmdale, right on the San Andreas). It was not until April that we moved back in our house. Tomorrow is the 12th year since then, so I reflect on that day, along with the months that followed, which truly changed me into the man I am today. I look back on that time in awe, in sadness, and in a strange sense of thanks. Though we ran away that day, it made me stronger. I changed that day. I was just a boy, but I became a man.
And now, it’s time for
Matt’s wacky world of science!
Today’s episode: I didn’t jog from no monkey!
Recently, a U of U bio prof named Dennis Branble (who I’ve heard teaches terribly but gave an awesome dept seminar) came out with an article in Nature saying that long-distance running created our unique body plan and helped differentiate it from other apes.
In the study, various types of running were examined in the lab. We really sucked, to be frank. Walking? Not very efficient. Running/Sprinting? We are one of the slowest animals (w.r.t. body size) around. What we do have is incredible endurance. We are #1 in bipedal marathon running (though after about 15 miles we start to fall off in efficiency).
Australopithecus was the first to be truly bipedal and get out of the trees. But it wasent until true Homo erectus evolved at 1.5 Ma that running became in fashion and tree climbing was all but abandoned. So, how is this known?
Well, there are over 26 traits that can show this divergence from Australopithecus to modern Homo sapiens sapiens. Some of the more telling:
- our flat faces and smaller facial features give us a better center of mass when running.
-our height and lankyness increase our surface area/volume ratio, for heat dispersion. Some of us, myself included, are moving away from this adaptation. On a side but related note… I joined a gym! Aly, Steph, and I are going swimming every tuesday and thursday morning at 6:30 AM, plus random workout every weekend.
-our long neck, separated from our shoulders, along with specialized ligaments and ridges, helps to stabilize and support our head during running. It’s hard to run if your head is flopping around with your shoulders.
-the way we sweat and breath is much more suited for long, continuous activity compared to our primate friends.
-ever wondered why your ribcage protects vital organs like the heart and lungs, but not the stomach, liver, and GI tract (while other primates have these ribs)? Is it because their not as important? Hardly! When you run bipedal, your upper body and lower body move independently as a result of the motion. In order to run consistently with good balance, you need to separate the two masses, or they interfere with each other. We do this by not having ribs in the lower body and using the lower back as a pivot.
-our short toes, enlarged heels, and lower arches are perfect for shock absorption and push-off needed for running.
-last, but certainly not least, our big butts. The glutes are the biggest part of our running balance and are needed for running since we have no tail. Cue the Sir Mix-a-lot.
One of the other most important factors in all this is the fact that humans have a broad area of efficiency.
As you can kinda see from the above figure (the right one) with speed on the x-axis and an efficiency proxy on the y-axis, most animals, at different speeds and styles, have parabolic shapes to their efficiency curves. Humans (dark blue line) have a nearly flat line; this means you can run at various speeds and get roughly the same unit output per unit effort. I.e., if you run 5 mph, you use x energy. If you run 10 mph, you use 2x energy. Other animals, regardless if they walk, gallop, trot, jog, or run (and actually humans at sprint and walking speeds), you have to dramatically increase energy to get a small increase in speed and there is only one speed at which you can efficiently move. This is why some people walk faster than others naturally, it’s just based on your body.
This ability to run at the same efficiency at different speeds not only help the endurance argument, but also may have helped human culture development. Since every population would have healthy and sick, young and old, etc., we, as humans, could ‘stick together’ and run together without a hindrance to any member of the group. This allows a community of people to act together.
So now, the only question is, why?
Well, there is only a few good theories on this. One, by David Carrier (also of the U) says that humans “chased to death” prey. Basically, since most yummy animals can out run us, we just kept running until they got tired. This also would have selected for intelligence, because the chase would have required a portion of our cunning… no…all of our cunning to catch a meal. There is not direct evidence for this, but there are stories of ancient cultures using this for hunting.
Other theories include transportation/migration and warfare (what else).
So, next time you go for a run, just tell everyone one you’re “catching up with your roots.” At which point they’ll look confused and think less of you.
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