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

From: Gerald Flaherty <grf2_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2006 12:36:30 -0500
Message-ID: <002c01c71edd$3a4da040$6402a8c0_at_Dell>

HO! HO! HO! Indeed
Jerry Flaherty
----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Horejsi" <accretiondesk at gmail.com>
To: "metlist" <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2006 11:48 AM
Subject: [meteorite-list] OT: Tis the Season... again


> 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.
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Received on Wed 13 Dec 2006 12:36:30 PM PST