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An Engineer
Calculates Santa's Trip
1) No known species of reindeer can fly. But it is estimated
that 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.
2) 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 378 million according to the Population
Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children
per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's
at least one good child in each.
3) 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 75-1/2 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 man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a
poky 27.4 miles per second a conventional reindeer can
run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
4) 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 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison this is four times
the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
5) 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 centrifugal forces 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 on Christmas
Eve, he's dead now.
Physics
Carols
O Gravity, O Gravity,
All Newton's theories crowning,
Where e'er we be, land, air, or sea,
We're subject to your "downing"
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- Shouldn't You Be In School?
by Angelina Hart
- This book strikes a humorous chord with all of us that attempt to find creative ways of answering, ignoring, overlooking, informing, defending or explaining our situation when that inevitable question comes our way.
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- Get Thee to a Punnery
by Richard, Lederer
- A fun way to laugh while learning parts of speech in order
to pun.
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