Subject:
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Poor old Santa
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general
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Date:
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Mon, 27 Dec 1999 01:13:26 GMT
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Viewed:
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671 times
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Merry Christmas All,
I got this little fact sheet from a work mate as it contained a
reference, all be it small, to lego:
> An Engineer's Christmas
>
> 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 (except maybe in Japan) 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 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, 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 thousands 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 re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of • reindeer
> would adsorb 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!
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