Last Christmas at dinner with friends/coworkers my daughter chimed in
with, "Santa likes Daddy's brand!" 5 is such a cute age.
:)
will
Jim Campbell wrote:
> Heh, good memories - I first read this - wow - maybe 6 or 7 years ago on
> 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.
> >
> >
> >
>
[Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
