At the level I’m talking, if Susanthika was born in Jamaica, she is the norm. I don’t mean all Jamaicans can run like her. But someone who can run like her is not exceptionally rare. In Sri Lanka, someone who can run like her is extremely rare, no matter how hard you train people. There’s certain things you can’t change without changing the genes themselves. For example, we’ll never be Rugby world champions simply because of the fact that we are smaller and weaker.

Um, would you mind explaining what you mean by “at the level I’m talking”? Also, how do you exactly quantify Susanthika’s attributes and then compare it with the general population of Jamaica? Have you done any studies on Susanthika or the general population of Jamaica to support the claim that “if Susanthika was born in jamaica, she is the norm?” You go on to say ” In Sri Lanka, someone who can run like her is extremely rare, no matter how hard you train people” — and I suppose you have done extensive research to support this claim?

” if Susanthika was born in Jamaica, she is the norm. I don’t mean all Jamaicans can run like her. But someone who can run like her is not exceptionally rare.” – Ahh Sharanga, you never fail to amuse.

Why? didn’t you see the whole pack of Jamaicans that finished ahead of susanthika.

The sad reality is that our athletics programme has deteriorated over the last decade or so. We were looking really good circa 2000 but since then things have gone south

@tastyjujubes,

Really? Have you done an extensive research before believing everything you believe now? Did you do an extensive research to learn that the sky is blue and apples are red? Bullshit.

The obvious fact is, Asians, in general, suck at track and fields events. You can go and count the number of Olympic medals we have won. India and China collectively make up about half of the world’s population, and have they won half of track and field Olympic medals? China’s winning in lot sports that are not track and field. They have only produced one Olympic runner during the recent past. Billions of people and one Olympic runner who won. That sucks. But at least the Chinese know where the hell to invest.

Do I have to do an extensive research to claim compared to Caucasians or African Americans, we are smaller and weaker? If you think so, you can become a politician and then become the sports minister. It’s because of people like you that Sri Lankan sports suck. Keep on investing in Rugby and shit. It would never get you anywhere, but being you, you’d have to do an extensive research to learn that it doesn’t work, so you can waste some more tax money.

@realist,

You morons are on fire these days.

So, don’t you agree that if you take 1,000 Sri Lankans and 1,000 Jamaicans, the probability of finding someone who can run like Susanthika from the Jamaican crowd is higher than finding someone like Susanthika from the Sri Lankan crowd? Of course you don’t. You’re a moron.

@tastyjujubes,

visit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica_at_the_Olympics

Kind of impressive.

Hurrah for armchair eugenics!

Susanthika type sprinters being common in Jamaica can very well be a cultural thing. The same way we are more likely to find the next Murali from Sri Lanka as opposed to Brazil.

And have you actually ever been out of the country. Have you met young Chinese people, have you met second generation Asians who live in Europe & America. They are not small, they are the same size as Caucasians. The Dutch average at above 6 feet today one hundred years ago they averaged at 5′ 2″ that’s not genetics that’s nutrition. Besides being big & strong won’t make you a sprinter, or much of anything. You talk about Chinese athletics but you conveniently forget Chinese swimming. How are they suddenly producing 6′ 6″ gold medalists. And not just one gold medalist mind you.

I think it’s mostly a cultural thing too. Sri Lankans are not disposed towards hurrying for anything.
Then there’s the poor intake of proteins and lack of access to training facilities.

You have not answered any of my questions, Sharanga. Instead, you have gone on a tangent – a diatribe really – on various other issues. Again, how do you exactly quantify Susanthika’s attributes and then compare it with the general population of Jamaica? Have you done any studies on Susanthika or the general population of Jamaica to support the claim that “if Susanthika was born in jamaica, she is the norm?” You go on to say ” In Sri Lanka, someone who can run like her is extremely rare, no matter how hard you train people” — and I suppose you have done extensive research to support this claim? Clearly you must have some experience at least in order to safely make any such claim. If you want to talk about science, why don’t you provide some journal articles quantitatively comparing Sri Lankans and Jamaicans, including details about genetics, their muscle structure, and case studies on how athletic training affects both populations.

Some Aussie sports phyiscian did say recently that he felt Sri Lankans had some joint problems. I suppose this would only make them more injury prone.

@tastyjujubes,

Various other issues? So investing in Rugby is not related to this? You act as if I have never even mentioned rugby. You act as if I had never even said when it comes to Rugby, we’ll never be good at it because we are smaller and weaker. You never asked whether I had done an extensive research. Why? Because you know that’s true. Even without doing an extensive research, you know that the world looks exactly like it would look if we were smaller and weaker than the people of most of the great Rugby playing nations.

And yet in the case of athletes, you need extensive research to believe that Sri Lankan women usually don’t even look like Susanthika. You need an extensive research to find that if you went looking for women who can run like Susanthika, you’re going to find more from Jamaica than you’d be able to find from Sri Lanka. This is just plain stupidity.

If you have actually done any science, you’d know that even though science text books say, form an hypothesis, design an experiment to falsify it, do it, measure the result, and do what’s necessary based on it, scientists don’t actually test any moronic hypothesis that comes to their minds. The hypothesis space is infinite. You can form any number of hypothesis to explain why apples fall. But Newton chose the one that’s most likely to be proven right. How did he do that. Did he form an infinite number of hypotheses and tested each and every one of them? If you think that’s what he did, you’re a moron. He formed a hypothesis that was most likely to be true, based on common sense and existing knowledge available to him. Otherwise, you’d forever be testing hypothesis after hypothesis without getting anywhere.

You, being the moronic scientist, can make the unlikely hypothesis that Sri Lankans and Jamaicans can both run equally well. You can test it, spend millions of rupees, and finally you will fail. If you want to be a good scientist, you have to go beyond the scientific method, and apply theories of rationality to your problem.

This is why even though there might have been many who could have done calculus faster than Einstein, it was Einstein who ended up creating General Relativity. He did with minimum amount of data. He didn’t wait for mountains of data to stack up before he created the theory.

But then, you were willing to spend all the money spent on Mihin and Mattla airport on SL athletes without doing any extensive research to find whether we are good at running. So you’d screw up the research as well.

I’ve also read that more Jamaicans carry a gene, or mutation , that makes their muscles twitch faster.

this is the gene

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACTN3

But it’s ridiculous to say that gene sets them apart as some super sprinter subspecies. It just so happens that almost all Olympic sprinters have that gene and so does 30% of the world population

Gum boil seems to confuse insight with pig pigheadedness.

@the way of the dodo,

And you probably think Jews have won more than 25% of Nobel Prizes for Physics because of their culture, and that someday, African Americans will also win 25% of the Nobel Prizes for Physics as well.

It’s useless to argue with a moron. But you are fantastic. I’ve never seen someone so consistently wrong.

@dodo the sore loser,

Gum boil seems to confuse insight with pig pigheadedness.

Oh. Don’t get confused. You and I are two people. Okay. It’s really funny. You’re the moron of the century.

“And yet in the case of athletes, you need extensive research to believe that Sri Lankan women usually don’t even look like Susanthika”
Suanthika was forced to run great distances as a child carrying food and tea for her mother who worked in the fields. Any other Srilankan woman of the same body type (I believe there are three types) could also develop strong muscles. But culturally Sri Lankan girls are not encouraged to run, whereas running is popular in Jamaica. If our girls had proper training, a good diet and the will to stick at it, I’m sure we could produce more Susans. Damayanthi Darsha had a more feminine figure, and was almost as good. Would have made up for strength with technique.

More shit from you sharanga. Do you think 70% of scientists are men because women can’t do science.

@dodo the sore loser,

More shit from you sharanga. Do you think 70% of scientists are men because women can’t do science.

Oh, what do you think? You think most scientists are men simply because men oppress women in all cultures in the world? That’s just plain moronic. In Sri Lanka, the number of women who enter the universities is higher than the number of men. There are more female medical students than male students. Your stupid culture does everything theory doesn’t hold.

The simple fact of the matter is, even though the average IQ of men and women are about equal, there are more men at the extremes. There are more men at the higher end of the IQ scale than women (like me), and there are more men at the lower end of the IQ scale than women (like you and realist). Men just deviate more. There are more male geniuses than female geniuses, and more male retards than female retards.

You are a moron who just cannot accept reality. Not just scientists, most philosophers, inventors, mathematicians, musicians, novelists, poets, religious leaders are men. I’m not downplaying the role of culture here. Culture has some effect. But that doesn’t explain why men seem to be doing better than women when it comes to doing abstract thinking. And culture certainly doesn’t explain why most serial killers and child molesters are men.

Being a politically correct moron, now you can call me sexist.

@shammi,

Oh. But you cannot say that about Sri Lankan boys right. You cannot say they are not encouraged to run. You remember the Chinthaka somebody who ran 100m for SL around 2000? Susanthika used to practice with him because in SL there was no competition to her. Chinthaka was the fastest 100m, 200m, runner in SL back then, and he struggled to keep up with Susanthika. So much for your girls aren’t encouraged to run theory.

Sharanga, you’re an idiot, but at least a mildly amusing idiot. Try and spot the difference between the two below statements.

No. 1

At the level I’m talking, if Susanthika was born in Jamaica, she is the norm.

No. 2

So, don’t you agree that if you take 1,000 Sri Lankans and 1,000 Jamaicans, the probability of finding someone who can run like Susanthika from the Jamaican crowd is higher than finding someone like Susanthika from the Sri Lankan crowd? Of course you don’t. You’re a moron.

Please tell me you can spot the issue between your two statements?

@realist,

Now here’s a moron who cannot decipher meaning of text from context. Are you really so stupid as to understand At the level I’m talking, if Susanthika was born in Jamaica, she is the norm. as me saying that most Jamaicans can run like Susanthika? I thought an educated adult would be able to decipher meaning of statements based on their context. Apparently you don’t belong to that reference class.

To come to any conclusion of any scientific value, we’d have to know something about Chintaka’s nutrition level, training pattern etc. Without that, your theory remains a hypothesis. Tasty’s original point, I believe?

@shammi,

Tasty’s original point was to allocate all the money spent on Mihin air, and Mattla airport to athletes based on his moronic, untested hypothesis that Sri Lankans are good at track and field events. It would make sense to spend a damn lot of on track and field events only if we would actually be good at it with some training. To know this for sure, we would have to do an extensive research based on his moronic hypothesis that we can run like Jamaicans, or African Americans. He wasn’t going to do that research. He simply wanted to give the money to athletics.

But say, for argument’s sake, that he really wanted to do the expensive, extensive research, based on his moronic hypothesis. Even then, we should not spend a dime trying to falsify his moronic hypothesis. True, there are occasions in history where hypotheses that seemed moronic have actually turned out to be correct. But those occasions are rare. We should discard his hypothesis simply because it’s dumb, and unlikely to be true, based on all the other evidence we have.

About what you said,
To come to any conclusion of any scientific value, we’d have to know something about Chintaka’s nutrition level, training pattern etc. Without that, your theory remains a hypothesis.

Not everything can be decided using science. We cannot do a reproducible experiment to learn everything. We sometimes just have to use reason. My hypothesis that Sri Lankans in general can’t run like Jamaicans is not a scientifically tested fact. It’s an untested hypothesis. But it makes rational sense. We know something about our height, we know something about our weight, we know something about the fact that we can’t digest fast food as efficiently as white people, and it makes quite a lot of sense to predict we won’t be good at certain sports. Tastyjujubes’ hypothesis is just plain irrational, considering that we’ve only won 2 Olympic silver medals since the day we started participating, which is far less than the starving Nigerians have won. I mean, when you see that some starving, skeleton like Ugandans or Ethiopians win Olympic gold medals and, and then see that we haven’t won a single gold medal since the beginning of time, you should know that something’s wrong with us.

I’m not being unnecessarily pessimistic. But you have to model your view of the world based on evidence. I mean, seriously, Ugandans and Ethiopians actually win Olympic medals.

Lol, Sharanga don’t get your frilly thongs in a twist…actually please do because it’s quite amusing.

Let us examine the facts, first off all you have come up with some imaginary level. Do you mean the level of athletes or the general public? Either way, saying someone like Susanthika is the norm implies that the athletes at the level of Susanthika should lie in the middle of a normal distribution of the athletic prowess of either of the groups mentioned above. Could you please back up your statement with some kind of a study? I believe you had asked that of me sometime ago.

“Do I have to prove your claims with evidence? Seriously? If you claim that god exists, is it my responsibility to produce evidence and prove that you are right”

In my comment previous to the above statement I was referring to evidence that was easily tracked down and well, the norm, if you bothered to do any research on the subject.

You on the other hand, despite being very eager to demand evidence from others about facts, seem quite leery to provide your own. I looked around for some study on Jamaican athletes that could corroborate your claim about Sustanthika being the ‘norm’ in Jamaica but was unable to do so.

I presume with your superior intelligence that you have said evidence?

Ah fortuitous timing. You think the Ethiopians who win gold medals are starving skeletons? You are seriously not so uneducated that you do not know about the environmental factors that have led to physiological changes in the Ethiopan marathon runners that have made them the best at that particular sport?

@realist,

Either way, saying someone like Susanthika is the norm implies that the athletes at the level of Susanthika should lie in the middle of a normal distribution of the athletic prowess of either of the groups mentioned above.

So when I said At the level I’m talking, if Susanthika was born in Jamaica, she is the norm., you thought I was actually saying that if you take all the athletes in Jamaica, all of them are more likely to end up winning Olympic medals than not. Really, are you such a moron for who context has no meaning?

Since you are a moron who cannot understand anything, let me explain what the hell I’m saying as I would to a child. Every four years, both Sri Lanka and Jamaica send athletes to the Olympic games to compete. If you take those athletes who go to the Olympics, you’d see that none of our athletes ever win. They suck. Only Duncan White and Susanthika Jayasinghe have won an Olympic medal since the first Olympics we participated, about sixty years ago. They too haven’t won a gold medal. So, in that context, Duncan White and Susanthika Jayasinghe are quite exceptional. It’s not normal for a Sri Lankan athlete to ever amount to anything at the Olympics.

On the other hand, Jamaicans send athletes to the Olympics too, and you know what, many of them end up winning. Their athletes, like Usain Bolt, Shelly Ann-Fraser, Veronica Cambell, actually end up winning. It’s not so unusual for a Jamaican to win an Olympic gold medal, just like it’s not unusual for Jew to end up winning a Nobel Prize for Physics.

Now, I cannot make everything I say moron-proof. I cannot explicitly state everything as I did above. Educated adults are supposed decipher meaning from context. But you just don’t meet the standards to call an educated adult.

***

About physiological changes of Ethiopians due to environmental factors. Yep, those, physiological changes due to environmental factors are called changes of gene’s frequency in the gene pool. That’s the whole point of my argument. There are things you just cannot change without changing the genes.

But, being a moron, you probably think evolution works like Lamarck’s transmutaion theory, and that we can somehow become like Jamaicans by having better nutrition, and training.

That whole diatrible and yet you fail to provide evidence for your statement about Susanthika being the norm in Jamaica, “But you have to model your view of the world based on evidence.” Lol.

Judging from the post about evolution on your blog, I think you have a very minimal understanding of evolution. Amongst most other things it seems.

Let me guess what you’re response will be, you’re gonna call me a moron!

@realist, tastyjujubes, dodo the sore loser, shammi, and any other moron who thinks it is a good idea for Sri Lanka to invest a large amount of money in track and field events.

I think I’ve made my point, and this will be my last comment on this thread. So if you have anything to say about this, say it on this thread. I don’t care. I’ve made my point pretty convincingly and I can afford to give you the last word. So don’t act like sore losers and refer to this discussion in future discussions we may have, like you did after losing the death penalty debate. Sore losers are just plain pathetic.

For all you have to say about Sri Lankan politicians, you are no better. You just don’t know where to invest. You just don’t have a concept of estimating the returns on investment. You moronically think it’s a good idea to invest a large sum of money in track and field events, even though you have close to nil evidence that we’ll ever be good at it. You guys are just crazy. All you have as evidence is Susanthika’s and Duncan White’s rare success at the Olympics. Two silver medals in sixty long years. And that is enough for you. Exception makes the rule for you guys. If you saw Steve Jobs, see his success, and learn that he never earned a degree, you’d think it’s a good idea to appoint a bum as you CEO. Never mind we sucked every time we went to the Olympics. Never mind countries such as Ethiopia and Uganda, which are supposedly worse-off than us, do better. Two silver medals in sixty years is enough for you crazy people to invest all the money spent on Mihin air and Mattala airport to try to win Olympic medals in track and field events.

You guys, especially tastyjujubes, would do well not to invest in anything. If you were an investor, investing in sports, being the moron you are, you’d invest your money in Sri Lankan track and field sports instead of investing that in Jamaica, or Bahamas, or USA. You will invest without doing an extensive research, since you’d do an extensive research only if someone tells you it’s a bad idea to invest. Even if I come and tell you not to invest, you will do a very expensive research to find out whether I make any sense, and burn all your money in the process. So again, don’t invest in anything. That’s the best advice you’ve ever got.

Gum boils’ world view goes way beyond evidence. Evidence is that there are a large number of good if not great Jamaican sprinters. This doesn’t in anyway mean there is something inherent & unique to Jamaicans make them better sprinters than those of any other particularly country. Can you reject this statement: What makes Jamaicans successful sprinters is NOT a unique genetic trait. The same goes for Women & Jews. For all your masturbation about your intelligence you don’t even know your burden of proof.

So Sharanga, you prefer to spend on the Mattala airport and an utter failure like Mihin rather than on developing athletics in the country. You have based thi view after extensive research on the viability of these two projects.

You would take a chance on not discovering a few Susanthikas now and then, and even if we didn’t find talent of that calibre, you wouldn’t want to improve whatever talent we do have.

You dont think investing in world class state of the art sports training facilities will be far more beneficial to the country than a regional airport and an utter failure like Mihin. (Your name must be Sharanga Rajapaka.

You dont think we should aspire to be the best we could even if we couldn’t produce medal winners like Jamaicans overnight.

Now who’s the moron?

Okay, I intended the last comment to be my last comment here. But this stupidity cannot go unanswered.

@dodo the sore loser,

Do you want scientific evidence that genes play a huge role in Jamaicans being great sprinters, or Jews being great abstract thinkers, or that men are better at mathematics than women? I would be able to dig up something from the internet, but I don’t want to. I never proposed my hypothesis that “we suck at track and field when compared to Jamaicans because we don’t have the necessary genes” as tested scientific theory. I only presented it as a plausible hypothesis, that kind of looks right, while your hypothesis that genes have pretty much nothing to do with Jamaican’s success at Olympics, Jews success at abstract thinking, and men’s success at a lot of things based on abstract thinking compared to women, and it has everything to with culture, is moronic.

Seriously, have you even watched a 100m Olympic event? How many white people do you see? How many Chinese-looking people do you see? How many Arabic looking people do you see? How many South Asian looking people do you see? And now tell me, how many black, tall, strong looking men of African ancestry do you see? Oh, I suppose it has something to with their culture which required them to run in the savannahs, about 500 years ago. Moron.

Then what about the Jews. They are pretty good at winning Nobel Prizes. I mean, they are seriously good, and if you are a Jewish genius who doesn’t get famous like Einstein or Richard Feynmann, you will be called another Jewish genius. They are that common. And the funny thing is, their culture and their religion aren’t that different from the culture and the religion of other white people. But somehow they end up winning more than 25% of the Nobel Prizes. I wonder why. What cultural difference makes others pale in comparison to Jews? Moron.

What about women? They seem to do so well in comparison to men nowadays when it comes to medicine, management etc. but somehow don’t often end up winning Nobel Prizes for Physics. I mean, only 2 women have won the Nobel Prize for Physics. Only 1 woman has won the Nobel Prize for Economics. Physics and Economics are the two most abstract fields the Nobel Prizes are awarded, and women suck at them. In comparison, Chemistry, which is little less abstract, has made 4 women winners. Medicine, which is even less abstract, has made 10 women winners. Literature, which is even less abstract, has produced 12 women winners. Nobel Prize for Peace, which is good for nothing, has produced 15 women winner. (source: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/women.html ) Now, how on earth are you going to attribute that to something about culture? Moron.

I’m quite sure I can produce details about some scientific researches that proves my point. But I don’t have to. In fact, I don’t want. You can’t do science by arguing. So what I’m saying is, my hypothesis looks kinda correct, while your hypothesis is obviously moronic.

@shammi,

You dont think we should aspire to be the best we could even if we couldn’t produce medal winners like Jamaicans overnight

We should. But dreaming and actually doing something are quite too different things. If you want to produce medal winners, invest in something there might actually be some returns.

So Sharanga, you prefer to spend on the Mattala airport and an utter failure like Mihin rather than on developing athletics in the country. You have based thi view after extensive research on the viability of these two projects.

I don’t have to defend Mihin and Mattala. I don’t have enough knowledge to comment about Mattala, but I know the Mihin air project was quite dumb. But that doesn’t mean you should pull money from a stupid project, and invest that in an equally stupid project. If you think Mihin air and Mattala airport projects are dumb, invest that money to feed children or something, or even improve ourselves at some sport in which might be good at. Jeez.

Okay, this is definitely going to be my last comment. Bye losers!

I’m sorry Sharanga, but writing volumes and volumes does not detract from the rather stupid claims you have made. You clearly said “At the level I’m talking, if Susanthika was born in Jamaica, she is the norm.” That is a pretty big claim to make because you’re saying that most Jamaicans (ie the majority of the Jamaican population) have the ability and skill of Susanthika Jayasinghe. I’m only asking you to provide some evidence to back up your sweeping claims – are you able to do that or not?. Also if we accept your claim, how come first and second place weren’t won by the Jamaicans when Susanthika ran – surely the Jamaicans could have put in some “above the norm” runners who were better than Susanthika and taken out the gold, silver AND bronze medals? Then you made another statement “In Sri Lanka, someone who can run like her is extremely rare, no matter how hard you train people” — can you let me know how you have come to this conclusion? How do you define “extremely rare”? Again, pretty simple questions to answer.

“But dreaming and actually doing something are quite too different things.”

I said aspire, not dream. To aspire and to dream are quite two different things.

Anyway, the seed of many a great achievement was a dream. Sometimes you achieve your dreams, oftentimes not. You may even make a serendipitous achievemment in the process that you never even dreamed of. An unexpected bonus, in an imperfect universe.

True. I thought about that too. But Murali was consistently good for a long period, broke many records, i widely recognised, respected and has left a more lasting mark in his sport.
Susanthika’s feat was achieved with very little support, and she had to fight hard for every priviledge she got, so deserves a lot of respect.

Sach, Murali’s achievement is one for all times. He is one of the all time greats, arguably the greatest bowler, of the second most popular sport in the world.

Let’s face it susanthika is long forgotten as far as the international athletics community is concerned. Do you think the cricket community will ever forget murali. I’m willing to bet anything that 20-30 maybe even 50 years from now people will still be talking about murali, and not just sri lankans.