In my career as a Freelance Journalist , for nearly one and half years I wrote for the kids' and youth sections of The Nation newspaper which I enjoyed thoroughly . When I moved to Daily News I couldn't publish a few that I had already written for The Nation. This particular story is one of them too. I am delighted that the series is now resumed to http://nightowls.lk/ . You'll find more in the series as you scroll down.
The letter ‘S’ in mathematics can denote or mean two things. But to be precise it only means one thing. Letter S refers to Standard Deviation. However in basic math S may be used to denote Speed for our convenience. Standard Deviation is an important static. The Standard Deviation is a measure of how spreads out numbers are. In other words it is a number used to tell how measurements for a group are spread out from the average (mean), or expected value. For instance, think you and your friends measure the height of 5 dogs. The heights up to their shoulders are 600mm, 470mm, 170mm, 430mm and 300mm respectively. The average height or the mean height of a dog will be the sum you get when you add all these 5 heights and divide the answer by the number of dogs, which is 5 .The deviations would be each dog’s difference from the average height you have found. So you deduct each dog’s height from the average height, square it. The answers you get must be added together and divided by 5 again. Then you get the Variance. When the variance is squared what you get is called the standard deviation. Writing down steps can be confusing. But I am certain about one thing. You and I may not make use of deviation every day. They are often used by Statisticians to calculate to know how the population in a town or country is dispersed, to know the birth rate, death rate, or in Factories they might use deviation to know how the speed taken by its employees to manufacture a particular product varies.
Speed, however differs. Speed is the rate at which something
moves or operates. Or if rephrased better, it means how quickly something moves
or how fast you do work. If you want to know how fast you rode to Kandy from
Colombo, divide the distance that you traveled by the time you took to reach
there. You will then know the speed of your vehicle. Speed, unlike the Standard
deviation, is an everyday thing to us. Speed was taught in School. It might not made any significance to you back then though.
Several years ago I was invited to run the 200 meter relay
by the Higgins house Vice Games Captain. My instant response was a ‘No’. They
kept insisting me to do it because during that year two of the good runners from our house were out of the country. I am
not and was never a sprint. My events for every sports meet in school were
usually the long jump and sometimes I took triple jump too. I could say I was
good at them. But that year, in addition to field events I had to take part in a track event. During heats I came 3rd.
And that year was the only year I became a runner.
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| Pic Source : Internet |
The same year John, a colleague, an athlete from Higgins House,
a national level champion took part in the 800m, 1500m and 3000m relay. I could
never compare myself to John . John was fast. She was as fast as an eagle
through the air. She was the fastest I knew in Musaeus College. I loved
watching her in long distance events. She was different. Steady, upright and
herculean. In fact, Sprinters are clearly differentiated from endurance
athletes. Simply look at their physiques and you will note the remarkable
muscle bulk of the sprinter in the key prime movers. In contrast, the endurance athlete does not
display such muscle hypertrophy. He or she tends to be lighter, less bulked and
even drawn looking.
I had a question for John that day. I asked her how they
would run such long distances without a single break. John was also called Jonty or Jonny by her
friends. Jonty told me this.
Long runs stimulate
the marathon, which requires lots of time on your feet. It all comes with
practice. It is called endurance training. Endurance training is achieved by
doing lots of low intensity running. The key factor here is running slow and
running farther. And eventually you develop your speed with the time you‘ve got
to run. During trials we run three
quarters or sometimes two thirds of the distance slowly. Fastest runners do
most of their running at slow speed. Because they run a lot, and if they ran a
lot and did most of their running at high intensities they would quickly burn
out. You could do some training on this. You’ll be good. ‘ She said.
That was that. I never tried becoming a sprint though. Thereafter.
Several years after Jonty did her explanation, recently someone
was advising me not to rush over things. And that somethings in life comes
slowly no matter how fast we want to achieve them. We got to slow down then for
a moment. Jonty made sense that day.
Lots of sense, in fact. I think.
Take simple things.
You are late to school or office let’s say. And so you keep
driving fast because you want to be there before you are marked red. Driving fast
can possibly make us reach the destination early. True. But have you thought of
the flip side of driving fast? What if you drive over a person at the crossing?
What if you are unable to push the break or gear at the right time? It can
cause harm. Not only to someone else’s life but even yours. It can even result
in death. We’d never know.
Think of an exam you are taking. Especially if that
is a math paper.You would have lots of questions to solve within a short period
of time. If you’d keep running around questions hastily all because you want to
finish everything on time , you may tend to skip steps when doing
calculations and eventually land on to a
wrong answer. Unless you have time to double cross them, you would not know if
you have got it right or wrong.
Speeding on speed is harmful. You see.
Some of us want to become Managers, Entrepreneurs, Bankers,
Doctors or whatever when we grow up. And in this process of becoming a Banker
or a Doctor you and I will have to collect qualifications and experience. That is how we are been told. Some of us want
to pick on several degrees or several certificates at once thinking that it
will help them to reach goals sooner. That’s possible however given that you
don’t rush from one to another. And if you do so, you wouldn’t know what you
have learned or acquired in the end. Sometimes doing lot of things at once can
make us tired when achieving goals. And this is why we have to slow down.
Take trains for instance. When trains speed up and if you happen
to look outside from a window you won’t see anything clearly. Everything will
look like flash lines. Tress would appear like long green lines . Everything
you see through a train would disappear in a blink when it moves fast. Same way,
when you keep running quickly over things you don’t see what’s there in it. You
won’t have time to experience and enjoy what you do either.
Life is like running. Really. If you carefully think.
Running at a high speed the moment you start off something can
destroy your energy. And your journey will be a short one. Slowing down is good
therefore. But that doesn’t mean being too slow either. Being too slow means
you are very late to reach where you want to be.
Speed. Think about it.
Other articles in the series :