[meteorite-list] OT: Tis the Season... again

From: Martin Horejsi <accretiondesk_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2006 09:48:24 -0700
Message-ID: <9c2f96d20612130848x6e2ce6c0qfc67232ddba40ee2_at_mail.gmail.com>

Greetings all,

Seems that we have a new crop of List viewers this season so I thought
I'd repost a Christmas conundrum that has puzzled me in the past.
Since this story was borrowed from somewhere, original reference long
lost, I again give my disclaimer: I didn't check the math, so use this
story at your own risk.

Merry Christmas!

Martin




Engineering Christmas: some points of contention

1.
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the
world. However, since Santa does not generally visit children of
non-Christian 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 home.


2.
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 purpose 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--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, and conventional reindeer can
run (at best) 32 miles per hour.


3.
The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that
each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (about 2 pounds), the
sleigh is carrying over 500,000 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 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).

Of course then, 4.600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second
creates enormous air resistance-- this would heat up the reindeer in
the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's
atmosphere.(which may explain Rudolph's red nose). 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
centrifugal 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 goo. And yet, he returns year
after year.


5.
Therefore, the rules of Newtonian physics obviously don't apply to Santa and his
yearly mission. Speaking as an engineer, this guy must know something about
relativity that the rest of us have yet to discover.

HO, HO, HO.
Received on Wed 13 Dec 2006 11:48:24 AM PST


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