Sinister: Laugh ? I almost...........

[Adrian Evans]

For those listees with children.

SANTA CLAUS: AN ENGINEER'S PERSPECTIVE

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 that 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 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
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
(900g), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting
Santa
himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 150 Kgs.
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).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 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 vaporised
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 17,500 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 pink goo.

Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now. Merry Christmas.
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