our trusty 7100/80 AV PowerMac that we'd spoofed an IP for so we could
connect to the school's network. Anyway, a friend of mine dug it up on
a newsgroup and we were in tears after reading it. Just the mental
image of a bunch of reindeer bursting into flames, I guess.
Anyway, they don't take into account Santa having to take along
approximately 8 tons of Maalox after eating an (estimated) 180 million+
cookies and drinking at least half that many glasses of milk, although,
oddly, Mom always put out cognac for Santa at our place...
- Jim
C. Hatton Humphrey wrote:
>Reminds me of a funny I read about when a team of Engineers sat down to
>figure out if Santa Clause truly existed... Here's the results:
>
>Hatton
>
>The Engineer Reflects - Is There a Santa Clause?
>
>No known species of reindeer can fly, BUT there are 300,000 species of
>living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects
>and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only
>Santa has ever seen.
>
>There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world, BUT since
>Santa doesn't appear to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist
>children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total, or 378 million
>according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5
>children per household, that is 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at
>least one good child in each.
>
>Santa has 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 822.6 visits per second. This is to say
>that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of
>a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the
>stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever
>snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and
>move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops
>are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be
>false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now
>talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75� million miles,
>not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31
>hours, plus feeding, etc.
>
>This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000
>times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest manmade
>vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per
>second -- a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
>
>The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that
>each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the
>sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably
>described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more
>than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could
>pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even
>nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload -- not even
>counting the weight of the sleigh -- to 353,420 tons. Again, for comparison:
>this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
>
>353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
>resistance -- this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as
>spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer
>will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy per second, each. In short,
>they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer
>behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire
>reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa,
>meanwhile, will be subjected to G-forces of 17,500.06 times greater than
>gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to
>the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
>
>In conclusion -
>
>If Santa ever DID deliver presents of Christmas Eve, he's dead now.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim Campbell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> We had equations and charts spanning maybe 40 sheets of
> paper (both sides), but realized it would be folly. The electricity
> required to move the train that fast would brown out almost the entire
> US west of the Continental Divide, not to mention the almost certain
> liquifecation of the passengers, which would really put the kibosh on
> vacation plans.
>
>
>
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