Xmas-Files / Microsoft

[Susan Kline]

At 08:21 AM 12/19/98 -0800, Del wrote:
>
>
>Ron Nossaman wrote:Snip...snip....
>
>> "Officially.  Two days ago, eight prized Scandinavian reindeer
>> vanished from the National Zoo, in Washington, D.C. Nobody--not even
>> the zookeeper-- was told about it. The government doesn't want people
>> to know about Project  Kringle. They fear that if this thing is proved
>> to exist the public will stop  spending half its annual income in a
>> holiday shopping frenzy.  Retail markets will collapse.  Scully, they
>> cannot let the world believe this creature lives.  There's too much at
>> stake.  They'll do whatever it takes to insure another silent night."
>
>----------------------------------------------------

>Well, now.  Let's think about that for a minute.
>
>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 that 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, and assuming that he travels
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 stockings, 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 on to 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 purpose
>of our calculation), 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 --3000 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, 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 thousand tons, not counting Santa
>himself.
>
>On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even
>granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull ten 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 each absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy
>per second, 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/s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration
>forces of 17,500 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 :-)
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>(Copied from I don't know where...)
>
>Beam me up, Scotty.
>
>Del

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Simple, Del. If you believe in Santa, either you believe that good
children are a fraction of the group so small as to be insignificant, 
or you believe that he has a time machine, or both. With a time 
machine, he'll need that snack of milk and cookies, because the 
reindeer will take so long to get him to the different houses. And, 
living for several time-dilated "Santa years" on only milk and 
cookies, no WONDER he's overweight!!

Q.E.D.

Merry Christmas, all.

Susan

Susan Kline
P.O. Box 1651
Philomath, OR 97370
skline@proaxis.com