Posts: 1547
Threads: 126
Registered: August 16th, 2004
Member Is Offline
Location: Hobart, Tasmania
Theme: UltimaBB Pro Black
Mood: Notchy
posted on December 27th, 2005 at 11:37 PM
Its late, but, "An Engineer's Christmas"
Hi all
Haven't had access to the net over Christmas, but here's something i found hilarious!
An engineer's view of Santa....
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 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 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
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 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 travelling 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 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 17,500
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.
Merry Christmas!
:tree
[ Edited on 27-12-2005 by jo_tas ]
pete wood
A.k.a.: figure itout
23 Windows of Awesome
Posts: 6828
Threads: 389
Registered: January 15th, 2004
Member Is Offline
Location: Nth Nth StMarys, Sydney
Theme: UltimaBB Pro White
Mood: upgrades = jackstands
