WINMX Assorted Textfiles/Ebooks.tar/Text - Humor - Santa Analysis.txt

Text File | 2003-08-15 | 4KB | 68 lines

Santa Analysis

IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS?

As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help
from that renowned scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990) - I
am pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.

  * No known species of reindeer can fly.  BUT there are 300,000 species
    of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these
    are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying
    reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

  * There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world.  BUT since
    Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist
    children, that reduces the workload to to 15% of the total - 378 million
    according to Population Reference Bureau.  At an average (census) rate of
    3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes.  One presumes
    there's at least one good child in each.

  * Santa has 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 822.6 visits per
    second.  This is to say that for each Christian household with good
    children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the
    sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the
    remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been
    left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move
    on to the next house.  Assuming that each of these 91.8 million
    stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we
    know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept),
    we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2
    million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least
    once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

This means that 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
on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second - a
conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

  * The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element.  Assuming that
    each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the
    sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably
    described as overweight.  On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more
    than 300 pounds.  Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point#1)
    could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with
    eight, or even nine.  We need 214,200 reindeer.  This increases the
    payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430
    tons.  Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the
    Queen Elizabeth.

  * 353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
    resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as
    spacecrafts re-entering the earth's atmosphere.  The lead pair of
    reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy.  Per second.
    Each.  In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously,
    exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms
    in their wake.  The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within
    4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to
    centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity.  A
    250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned
    to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's
dead now.