From a horse's perspective, there are few intrinsic rewards for winning a race.
Reaching the end might mean relief from the pressure to keep galloping at high speed and hits from the jockey's whip, but the same is true for all the horses once they pass the finishing post. If the race is close, the horse that eventually wins might even be whipped more often in the final stages than horses further back in the field.
So while being first to reach the winning post can be crucially important to the horse's human connections, there is very little direct, intrinsic benefit to the horse that would motivate it to voluntarily gallop faster to achieve this outcome.
So does a horse even know it's in a race? Again, the answer is likely "no".
Running (cantering or galloping) is a quintessential horse behavior and horses voluntarily run together in groups when given the opportunity – even in races without jockeys. However, there are a number of reasons to think horses have not evolved a desire to "win" during a group gallop.
Being herd animals, horses have an instinct to run together. Getting way out ahead of the other horses, at least in the wild, is a good way to get eaten by predators. Many ages of horse evolution and, well, horse sense, say stick with the herd.
So race day is just a nice run with your horsey friends. Some horses like to run at the head of the herd — the front runners — and others prefer to hang back. Good jockeys know their horse’s tendencies and plan their race strategy accordingly, as the article explains while delving more into horse psychology.
But the bottom line is:
It's far more likely it is the combination of natural ability, physical fitness, and jockey skill that accounts for which horse wins, rather than any innate desire by that horse to get to the winning post before the other horses.
The horse does not care about your silly race, humans.
A NEW era for blimps may be emerging thanks to billionaire Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who aims to turn these sky-giants into cargo vessels.
Brin's company LTA Research has created a 400ft "lighter than air" blimp-like vehicle - dubbed Pathfinder 1 - which has recently received its airworthiness approval.
Once it flies, the Pathfinder 1 will be the largest aircraft to take to the skies since the tragic Hindenberg disaster in 1937, when Zeppelins were largely abandoned.
One little flaming disaster, and everyone gives up on lighter than air flight. It’s time for a comeback!
The US Federal Aviation Administration officially cleared Pathfinder 1 for takeoff last month, IEEE Spectrum reported.
It has been green lit to fly no higher than 1,500 feet.
That should be high enough.
While Brin might look like the latest tech billionaire to make his claim of the skies - it appears the Russian-American businessman anticipates Pathfinder 1 to be a humanitarian project.
The airship aims to be incredibly light but with a lot of space for cargo, making it an efficient means of delivering large amounts of aid and relief workers to difficult-to-access disaster zones.
"We believe lighter than air technology has the capacity to speed up humanitarian aid by reaching remote locations with little infrastructure, and to lower carbon emissions for air and cargo transportation," LTA's CEO Alan Weston told the Financial Times in June last year.
These airships could one day carry up to 200 tons of cargo each, Weston told Bloomberg in May.
Er … yes. That’s what I want an airship for too. To deliver humanitarian aid to disaster zones. Not because one of my favorite lesser known Jules Verne novels, The Master of the World, is about Robur the Conqueror, a maniacal flying machine inventor who tries to take over the world. No, not at all. 👀
But neither the materials science nor the manufacturing advances will take primary credit for LTA’s looked-for success, according to Taussig—instead, it’s the introduction of electronics. “Everything’s electric on Pathfinder,” he says. “All the actuation, all the propulsion, all the actual power is all electrically generated. It’s a fully electric fly-by-wire aircraft, which is not something that was possible 80 years ago.” Pathfinder 1 has 12 electric motors for propulsion, as well as four tail fins with steering rudders controlled by its fly-by-wire system.
The airship — its snow-white steampunk profile visible from the busy 101 highway — has taken drone technology such as fly-by-wire controls, electric motors and lidar sensing, and supersized them to something longer than three Boeing 737s, potentially able to carry tons of cargo over many hundreds of miles.
Pathfinder 1. But I think I’ll call mine Sky Ghost. Image: LTA Research (via Techcrunch)
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My current WIP features airships so this edition of Thursday Things was especially interesting! Thank you!