[OT] Christmas greetings.

[Kristinn Leifsson]

Dear List, merry Christmas, thank you for supplying a lonely islander with 
ample information, technical help and companionship.
Although I imagine many of you have read the following, I have been saving 
this little morsel of a tidbit of a jest for almost a year now, just to 
share with you, for I know that within your ranks there are many persons 
that enjoy a good spoof and a jolly good laugh.

I also wish you a happy new year, and personally welcome you to Iceland, 
although perhaps you´d like to come in relatively small groups over a good 
deal of time...


>          How The Engineers Can Spoil Christmas


>There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the 
>world. However, since Santa does not usually visit children of Muslim, 
>Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist 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 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, and 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 thousand 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 reentering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer 
>would absorb 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!!


Gleðileg jól og farsælt komandi ár!

Kristinn Leifsson