| In this magical holiday season, it's the best time to remind ourselves the fat old man with the funny red hat again. Of course, every year he works sooo hard to spy on everyone of us making sure we aren't too naughty when we black out after 8 shots of Grey Goose, or we were still good during Halloween when all the girls were in their slutty skirts and the guys were plainly checking them out. Then, of course, every year he manages to find a way to transpass all of our houses and eat our cookies (apparently cookie and milk isn't the best diet to keep his body in shape). It's time to remind ourselves how hard he works for us again and how truly magical he is, here are some facts about him: 1) 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 discovered and put it to use. 2) There are 2 billion children in the world (persons under 18). But since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist children, that reduces the workload by 85% of the total - leaving 378 million. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there is at least one good child per house. 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 1/1000 th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, 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. Santa is better than that, but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household, a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding, etc. That means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, or 2340000 miles per hour, 3000 times the speed of sound. 4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming each child gets nothing more then a medium sized LEGO set (2 lbs), the sleigh is carrying 321300 tons, not counting Santa. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting the 'flying reindeer' can pull TEN TIMES that normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine - we need 214200 reindeer. This increased the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh to 353430 tons. For comparison, this is four timed the weight of the HMS Queen Elizabeth. 5) 353000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. This will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy per second, each. In short, they will burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating a deafening sonic boom in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 0.00426 second. Santa meanwhile, will be subject to centrifugal forces of 17500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250 lb Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by a 4,315,015 pound force. Oh Santa, please don't work so hard. I will make sure to leave an extra piece of cookie for you =) |
