Bad News

[Matthew_McNally]

[Steve]

great!.. save me a few quid!

Put more money done on my stereo!

only joking... kinda feel bad now... what has come over me??

[Steve]

ohh talking of xmas.. i have found this new great remote control!

[norkep]

But beware of the 3 rings

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Engagement

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Wedding

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.and

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SUFFERING :( :(

[wildrnes]

if that doesn't get em crying this will

i think this is what the mad viccar said at the service last wk

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 there is

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 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 1/1000 th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out,

jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, 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 onto 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 thousands tons, not counting Santa himself.

On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even

granting that the "flying" reindeer can pull 10 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 adsorb 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 17,000 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

[JOHNNY-BOY]

Very delicately put Wildrnes

Merry Christmas to you too :hohoho: