Dear List, merry Christmas, thank you for supplying a lonely islander with ample information, technical help and companionship. Although I imagine many of you have read the following, I have been saving this little morsel of a tidbit of a jest for almost a year now, just to share with you, for I know that within your ranks there are many persons that enjoy a good spoof and a jolly good laugh. I also wish you a happy new year, and personally welcome you to Iceland, although perhaps you´d like to come in relatively small groups over a good deal of time... > How The Engineers Can Spoil Christmas >There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the >world. However, since Santa does not usually visit children of Muslim, >Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for >Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the >population reference bureau). >At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to >108 million homes presuming there is at least >one good child in each. >Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, >thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, >assuming east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 >visits per second. >This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa >has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the >chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining remaining presents >under the tree, eat whatever snacks >have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and >get onto the next house. >Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around >the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the >purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per >household -a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom >stops or breaks. >This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second--3,000 times >the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made >vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, and moves at a poky 27.4 miles per >second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour. >The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that >each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set (two pounds), >the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa >himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 >pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer can pull 10 times the >normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of >them---Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not >counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven >times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the >monarch). 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous >air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a >spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer >would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, >they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer >behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. >The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a >second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. >Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating >from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to >acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems >ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 >pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him >to a quivering blob of pink goo. >Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now. > Merry Christmas!! Gleđileg jól og farsćlt komandi ár! Kristinn Leifsson
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC