Today I Learned (TIL)

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TIL that it may be faster for humans to run on all fours. (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

submitted 5 months ago by gedaliyah@lemmy.world to c/til@lemmy.ca

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The fastest human on the planet might be a quadrupedal runner at the 2048 Olympics, which may be achieved by shifting up to the rotary gallop and taking longer strides with wide sagittal trunk motion. More generally, investigation of quadrupedal running will not only result in the development of new techniques that allow biomechanists to study locomotion in natural settings but will also reveal the underlying principles of how these runners accomplish their astonishing performances.

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[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 55 points 5 months ago (3 children)

So somehow the lesson is not "be careful with curve extrapolation," but "extrapolating curves totally always works and so that's my justification for this xkcd-level of weird nonsensical conclusion, now more funding pls"

[–] Skua@kbin.earth 23 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The fastest end of the 95% confidence interval has quadrupedal humans doing 108 kmh / 67 mph in 2100, which would have us vying for the title of fastest animal on land. Seems about fucking right team good work

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Hey everybody this guy’s over here questioning the curve

Get him

[–] Nomecks@lemmy.ca 6 points 5 months ago

HERESY AGAINST DOCTRINE!

[–] Ifeelya@lemmy.world 16 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Nah bro, these 7 data points are trending downwards, therefore we can totally project with 95% confidence that humans will be running a sub-6 second 100m on all fours by the year 2100.

[–] moistclump@lemmy.world 7 points 5 months ago

Ok I think I’m getting it. So if a human runs on all 8 legs it should be a 3-second 100m right?

[–] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

The study covers an awful lot more than that. Even the posted excerpt discusses gait analysis and mechanics. Yes it's a projection, but it's hardly unfounded.

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 22 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

We plotted the historical world records for bipedal and quadrupedal 100-m sprint times according to competition year. These historical records were plotted using several curve-fitting procedures. We found that the projected speeds intersected in 2048, when for the first time, the winning quadrupedal 100-m sprint time could be lower, at 9.276 s, than the winning bipedal time of 9.383 s.

Video analysis revealed that in quadrupedal running, humans employed a transverse gallop with a small angular excursion.

These results suggest that in the future, the fastest human on the planet might be a quadrupedal runner at the 2048 Olympics.

I stand by my analysis. Statement #1 is fine, if a little bit wierd. Statement #2 doesn't excuse or ameliorate the total cuckoo pants nonsense of statement #3, though.

If what's the in study is somehow different -- like if the first sentence is "obviously we're not saying that extrapolating these two particular curves forward suggests the exact year when sagittal trunk motion will manage to overcome millions of years of evolutionary re-optimization away from quadrupedal gait, that would be insane" -- then sure. But if that's true, they should have written the abstract different.

[–] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

Fair enough!