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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Step1 who wrote (82358)	7/17/2000 1:49:18 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Hi Stephan Gilbert; Re bear stories... Like you, when I was a kid, we were told to run downhill in the event of having to run from a bear, but not to run at all unless the thing took off after us... I think the running downhill is a relative calculation. Bears have a top speed downhill which is not much better than their top speed uphill, but humans can cruise downhill. Humans just don't have that much short term strength, compared to most animals, so we can use the gravity assist, but have incredible endurance. I'm pretty sure humans top out at around 30MPh in the 100 yard dash. No question that if you see a bear too close, he can catch you. But what I was trying to say was that a human can always, eventually, catch a bear, provided he can track it (over reasonable running terrain). The other animals typically have higher short term speeds, but humans have better "crusing" speed. I think this shows that even back in the days when we were subject to significant predation, the other predators avoided us if they could, and I think this is largely due to our primitive missile technology. As long as we are getting long winded and off topic, one of the scariest nights of my life was spent as a boyscout camp counselor, aged 14 or 15. Just before sundown we found an old camp that had clearly been torn up by bears. Broken brush, and torn up camping goods, along with some messy old bones. After bringing a few bones back into camp, we spent the night exchanging speculation as to what had happened to the users of that camp, what part of the body the bones were from, and what we would do in the event of sensing a bear in our presence. I seem to recall talk that on very stormy, windy nights, forest animals tend to head for clearings to avoid tree falls. This didn't apply because the night was crystal clear with the milky way in full glory, but Sagittarius and Scorpio took a lot longer than usual to bury themselves under the western horizon that summer night. I never saw dawn's pale light with more pleasure than the next morning. The sun didn't solve the mystery of the abandoned camp, but the bones were clearly that of rather sophisticated bears, as one could clearly, by the light of day, see the butcher's saw marks. I used to hike alone at night in the desert, and the worst things I ran into were wild dog packs, close to the city. The desert at night is a wonderful place for cross country hikes, particularly with a full moon. I stopped doing it not after twice walking full tilt into barbed wire fences (which look a lot worse than they feel), but instead after thinking too much about the prevalence of deep prospecting holes in that part of the country. -- Carl P.S. I don't know if the bear talk is subliminal. This bull market is so impenetrable, that I doubt that a gang of roudy boyscouts is going to make much of an impression on it, much less one guy with a 10mm.