[Epic] Santa; off topic!!!!

From: Jon Nielsen <jon_at_...>
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 01:13:17 +0100

Some of you may have heard this one before...

SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective

> >I.
> There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18)in the
> world. However, since Santa does not 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 house hold, that
>
> comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good
> child
> in each.
>
> II.
> Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the
> different
> time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels 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 stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the
>
> tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the
> chimney,
> jump into the sleigh and get on to 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, moves at a poky 27.4 miles
> per
> second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.
>
> III.
> 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 could pull ten 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).
>
> IV.
> 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 re-entering 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
> centrifugal forces of 17,500 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.
>
> V.
> Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
 
Merry Christmas

Jon "The Psyker" Nielsen
jon_at_...

This is Lameth, The Dark Messiah, signing off

"It's driving me crazy, I simply can't stop thinking!"
Received on Thu Dec 04 1997 - 00:13:17 UTC