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Total Votes : 14 |
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| NBarden |
 Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 12:03 am |
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Joined: 28 Dec 2006
Posts: 5468
Location: I don't know...
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A little late, but oh well.
An Engineer’s View of 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 1 in the world. BUT since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload 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 0.78 miles per household, a total trip of 71.604 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding 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 poky 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 traveling 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 been vaporized by now! |
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| La_Sin_Grail |
| Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 12:06 am |
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Joined: 14 Aug 2005
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Location: Maryland
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I thought at first this was going to become a stereotype joke for smart Asian kids who play ping pong when it was all about school.  |
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| Anonymous Prodigy |
| Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 9:00 am |
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Joined: 10 Jan 2006
Posts: 4197
Location: United States
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Nice calculations, NBarden. It’s a good thing no little kids are on this site; they would be exposed to the truthful statistics. I suppose parents will have to make up another lie; "Um, well, little Billy, um, *cough*.....um, Santa is taking an eighty year vacation, and he’s having all the, um, parents, help him out while he’s vacationing in, um, Moscow."  |
| I had to put something here. |
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| Gagnut |
| Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 11:21 am |
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Joined: 14 Mar 2006
Posts: 846
Location: Ames, Iowa
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I’ve heard the ping-pong ball one before, just without all the extra stuff, it’s crazy, but that’s why it is hilarious.
I thing that Reader’s Digest has alot of funny jokes. But I can’t think of them off my head right now. |
| I don't have an avatar, I don't have a sig, my posts speak for themselves. |
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| sickofpalantirs |
| Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 3:16 pm |
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Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 7750
Location: somwhere, over the rainbow way up high. There's a land that I heard of once in a lullaby.
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| I’ve heard the ping-pong one but it was slightly different. Did you find it somewhere and just copy and paste? or type it all up? |
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| NBarden |
| Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 10:16 pm |
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| CarpeGuitarrem |
| Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 10:54 pm |
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Joined: 07 Apr 2006
Posts: 3361
Location: Franciscan University of Steubenville
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sickofpalantirs wrote: I’ve heard the ping-pong one but it was slightly different. Did you find it somewhere and just copy and paste? or type it all up?
I made it up as I went...that’s the beauty of the joke. There’s no way I’d manage to remember it as it was originally told to me. So I just flew with it. I could have made it a lot longer.
NBarden, that was great! It’s funny that somebody actually went through and did the calculations. But you forgot...Santa is magic...which requires an entirely new set of calculations, of course. You have to adjust for the derivative of the integrated sum of the functions bounded by x=1 and y=2 as n approaches infinity. |
| "ok, change of plans. the Cobracards christmas party is coming to my house, and we’re gunna teach FM how to hunt." (mm) |
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| NBarden |
| Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 11:04 pm |
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| macheteman |
| Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2007 9:55 pm |
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Joined: 07 Dec 2006
Posts: 1200
Location: The Jungle
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i know this is an old thread, but i just thought of a joke that has always made me laugh.
Why do Pilgrim’s pants always fall down? Because they wear their belt buckles on their hats. |
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| Celebrimbor |
| Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2007 10:38 pm |
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| Look at my sig. |
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