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The whole shit
is a damn lie! Read on...
SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective:
First off: All the Children
There are approximately two billion children (under
18) in the world. However, since Santa does not 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 house hold, that comes to 108 million
homes,
presuming that there is at least one well behaved child in each.
Second: The Crucial Timing Aspect
Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with,
thanks
to the different time zones and the earth rotation,
assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical,
why...?).
This works out to 967.7 visits per second.
This is to say that for each Christian household with a
well
behaving child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to
park
the sleigh, jump out, rush down the chimney, fill the
stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the
tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him (if
any), get
back
up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the
next
house or apartment.
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly
distributed around the globe (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 house-
hold; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting
bathroom stops or breaks (not allowed). 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.
Weight, oh man, the WEIGHT!
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. Don't add
the weight he puts in with snacks, as we know he's not
being
able to bathroom-brake.
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).
Energy, what's with the darn energy...?
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
absorb
14.3 quintillion (heh?!) 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 650 mps in .001 seconds,
would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g's,
which
means a sudden weight dropped on his fat corps
comparable
to the moon in an instant.
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.
Finally, the lies are unveiled!!!
Therefore, if Santa does exist, he's dead now!
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Santa's, when Santa Claus goes bad... |