The very next post in the thread contains multiple cites that yes, indeed, there are penalties for failing to make weight. The thread is about how Chuck will often speak authoritatively about subjects he doesn’t know about. It’s not that hard to follow, guys…
Only kinda-sorta, if you want to stretch things to give him the benefit of the doubt. Each race can have additional conditions added onto the standard rules. In some races, an owner can voluntarily have his horse carry more than the rules for that race require, but he has to decide to do so and announce it several days in advance. On the day of the race, the horse will carry what was announced, or else it won’t race. Then people get fined. Bad news all around. In other words, what everyone else in the thread said, and the poster who responded to him proved, with cites. He’s living proof that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, there.
Well link to the fucking thread as a whole then, you brain-dead dipshit, or to the post that refutes him, and not just to his one single post. Better still, provide a few quotes to help make your point. I don’t know anything about horse-racing, so i have no clue whether or not he was correct, and linking to a single post tells me jack-shit.
I actually did mean to link to it like this instead of sending you directly to the post by itself. That said, you do realize that the single post view has the same link, right? Meaning you could have clicked through to the thread and been taken right to the post, with the contrary response immediately below. Instead you couldn’t wait rush back to this thread to wonder aloud about things you could have easily confirmed for yourself. Apparently making that one extra click was asking way too much…
CH- as I said in the other thread, this is not standard practice in racing that i know of. If an owner/ trainer wants to have the horse carry additional weight (such as a heavy jockey) they need to apply to the stewards for permission. That may or may not be forthcoming.
Under no circumstances can the horse carry less weight and I believe Reality Chuck is wrong there.
(I would add that my racing knowledge is Australasia, Europe and S.E. Asia. If the rules are different in the USA I stand corrected; however I have watched and listened to a fair amount there and would be surprised if the rules are vastly different).
…
I’ll give you a hand here:
Later amended to:
And specifically:
His “best research available” to support that was a series of cites explaining scale effects, specifically why animals whose masses cover 5 orders of magnitude all have similar jumping abilities: e.g. “grasshoppers, cats, people, and horses can all jump about a meter.” The cites were meant to *explain *the commonly observed *scale *effect, not rigorously set a limit on performance of animals having widely different physiologies.
To Blake’s credit, he relaxed his definition of “about a meter” after someone pointed out that vertical leaps by humans of well over a meter have been recorded. But he apparently still thinks that his cites confirm that “no members of a jumping species raise their centers of gravity more than about about one meter when they jump” when they don’t. At all.
Indeed.
Its no fun when the guest of honor doesn’t show up.
My knowledge is exclusively US. I may not have been clear. In some races (not all), the additional rules for that race will allow extra weight. But the horse owner has to decide in advance and announce it. Once that’s done, the horse is NOT allowed to carry more than the announced weight. Horses are never allowed to carry less. But let’s not get into arguments over racing trivia, and spoil Chuck’s pitting. 
Regarding vertical jump potential some members seem to have missed
post #151 to that thread:
Galago Senegalensis Five Foot Vertical Jump
Another thing-- this Blake guy was unreasonably and continuously dismissing
personal observation as “anecdotal”. I believe there is a point where such
should rather be considered eyewitness. It is not necessary to call in the boys
and girls in the white lab coats and the calibrated instruments to be reasonably
confident about such often-witnessed phenomena as feline leaping ability.
You’re right that Blake at one point did say “no more than one meter”. Apologies. Before that, and after that he used “about.”
I don’t have any emotional attachment to Blake or to the discussion, but I don’t think there was any valid evidence of humans leaping more than a meter.
The example of Champ Bailey was given (46", or less than 7" over a meter.) I’m not sure about the precise technique used at the Indy Combine for measuring vertical jumps, but the testers see how high the player can reach, and then the player leaps and tries to flip small flags attached to a vertical pole. The difference is the vertical leap measurement.
There are a bunch of potential problems there:
–First (Wikipedia says) athletes can cheat by not reaching to maximum height, so their basepoint is artificially low.
–Second, (I’m guessing here) the athlete’s reach is measured flat-footed. I’m not a scientist, but I imagine that measuring the athlete’s reach on tiptoe would give more valid information, since the leaper is presumably leaping off his toes.
–Third, simply twisting your body so that one hand is much higher than the other (which every vertical leaper does) is probably a means getting extra height by body manipulation. (Rather than simply raising the center of gravity by leaping) I don’t know enough to analyze the factors involved, but that’s my guess.
Another piece of supposed evidence was Olympic records from the 1900 Standing High Jump Event. The linked photos showed that Ray Ewry raised his legs as he went over the bar. That means the measurements did not simply show how high he could leap.
In the thread, Blake was (almost) the only one using decent critical thinking, and he repeated said that he was open to evidence showing he was wrong. Maybe some of the opposing cites were valid, but there was so much bullshit surrounding them that the good may have been swept away with the bad.
We must have read different threads. I too am unfamiliar with Blake but found it to be one of the funniest reads I’ve seen here lately; he comes off comically bad. The best part is his sudden disappearance from the thread rather than admitting he was wrong.
Well, here is a video showing a cougar jumping from a stand still pretty damn high. Not sure what the most accurate method of measuring is, but even the most conservative method of tracking the very bottom of the outstretched lower leg puts it at the guys belt, at minimum, which seems over 2 feet.
Interesting. The nice cougar video you linked to shows the kitty jumping straight up, without a running start, so it’s good evidence. And features slow motion!
It’s hard to say exactly how high the cat’s back paws get off the ground. Sometimes they’re pulled up, but sometimes (again, nice video) they are stretched out full. I think that by the time they’re stretched out full, the cat’s pelvis has stopped rising and the legs are swinging up sideways.
Your conservative estimate of belt high is more than fair, and kitty might go above the man’s navel. (But not up to the pecs.) We don’t know how tall the man is, and the camera angle is very good, but could still introduce some misperceptions.
I’m 5’11" and my navel is 41" high.
I hate to get stuck in the job of defending someone I don’t know from a ancient thread, but… If you’d read the first page of the thread, you’d know that Blake was going from memory when he said two feet, and he then found multiple cites which supposedly gave the “about a meter” figure. (I say supposedly because I didn’t read the cites. They looked to be more technical than I could decipher.)
So the video supports Blake’s cites, more than it refutes his cites. It also looks like the kitty could have vaulted up to that turquoise line, 11 or 12 feet up, put out a paw and easily come to rest on a ledge that high in one smooth motion. All with a jump of just about one meter.
I don’t like Blake very much, but in that thread, he was the good guy. He was the one citing research, and asking for evidence against his view. Everyone else was citing something they’d seen personally, and refusing to consider evidence against their own views.
It was basically a case of vetted research vs some eyewitness testimony. We all know, surely, how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be as evidence that something occured.
Eyewitness accounts are famously unreliable. People routinely believe they’ve seen the very opposite of what they actually saw, in the most friendly-to-vision of circumstances.
ETA: The linked article mentions “vertical jump.” Does this specifically mean jumping from a standstill? Or can it include jumping with a running start?
Some people have little inclination or ability for critical thinking. I’m nothing exceptional in that regard, but there was so much fuzzy thinking coming from the people arguing against Blake’s cites that he seemed like a saint for staying around as long as he did.
There were dozens of clearly imprecise or irrelevant stories and articles:
–The cat can hear rodents up to 20(!) feet away and jump 10 feet into the air to catch birds! (Not nine? And how long is the cat’s body?)
–Champ Bailey is proven to jump 46"!
–You’re a fool, and calling someone a fool isn’t an insult
–A deer can jump over a six foot fence!
–You can trust me when I say that my cat jumps on top of my six foot refrigerator without boosting up with its front paws.
–A fish (or maybe an aquatic mammal jumped 35’ feet out of the water!! It’s on video.
–There’s photo of the Olympic champion of 1900 going over a bar more than a meter high. (see my post above for comments on this and on Bailey.)
And then there were many references to jumps where there was no way to know if the animals were taking running starts, or pulling themselves up with their front paws.
And while all that shit was pouring from posters’ fingers, people were jumping on Blake if he left out the word “about” or that he first said (admitting it was just from memory) two feet, instead of a meter.
Was Desmostylus’ last page link about the Galago Senegalensis the real deal that actually refuted Blake’s cites. Hard to say. The link is dead now. The quoted part does say that “jumpers might benefit from a mechanical power amplifier that releases previously stored energy” and I can’t tell if the article meant that the critter didn’t used a such a system or did use it.
If the Galago S. does use stored mechanical energy that might not be relevant to Blake’s cites. The thread, after all, was about humans having legs as strong as a cats.
So anyway Mr. Dissonance, if you think that Blake came off comically bad you may want to considered recalibrating your amusement meter. And leaving a thread after dealing with bad thinkers for three pages is nothing shameful.
Eyewitness accounts can be unreliable when relating extraordinary claims. Anyone who has ever owned a cat knows that they can jump more than 2 feet (later amended to ‘about a meter’). Cites he provided were either not on point or actually contradicted him. He was being provided with cites but bending into extreme contortions to try to dismiss them, from why tiger cages need to be at least 16 feet high when they can only jump 2 feet, to a zoo’s record of a Kangaroo making a standing jump of 2.44 meters, to galagos’ being able to make 2.25 meter standing jumps, to pumas making 6 meter standing jumps from the ground into trees. Point being none of these is extraordinary eyewitness claims along the line of ‘I saw a ghost out of the corner of my eye once,’ they are easily observable phenomenon.
Again, we must have read different threads. The only fuzzy thinking and lack of any kind of critical thinking was coming from Blake.
No, he left the thread after Desmostylus’ link discredited what little credit he had left. Refusing to concede your error after four pages of being completely wrong after being presented with mountains of cites may not be shameful, but it certainly demonstrates a lack of class.
The cougar video included in this thread is very good evidence that cougar can jump about one meter into the air.
My comments on the galago senegalensis in my previous post cast meaningful doubt on that article’s relevance. It might absolutely refute Blake’s cites, but we can’t tell from the thread and broken link.
If you literally mean your comment that the only fuzzy thinking was coming from Blake, then… I have no words. I gave seven examples of bad arguments in my previous post. There were many more (including “elephants can’t jump at all.”)
No, eyewitness accounts are well known to be unreliable in all cases, not just when relating extraordinary claims. As I’m sure you’ve read before, people will claim to have seen no gorilla walk through a room when a gorilla walked through the room right before their very eyes.
That’s what I thought at first when I was reading the thread. But then as I thought about it, I realized that for all I can tell from my memory, what I’ve actually seen is housecats moving their center of gravity up about a meter, grasping the edge of something, and pulling themselves the rest of the way up, all in a single fluid motion.
Blake correctly pointed out that this can be explained through a tiger’s ability to climb.
I did a thread search and I don’t find the word “kangaroo” in it.
As has been pointed out, the abstract of the article makes it unclear whether they are standing jumps involved, and also makes it unclear whether these jumps are augmented by stored energy. Of course Blake is discussing standing jumps without the use of stored energy by some special mechanism.
I don’t recall a cite here–I recall this being another case of a single eyewitness.