WastedTimes

[BRAIN53]

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 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 pokey 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
thousand 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 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 traveling 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
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 stop to 650 m.p.s. in
.001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration dead 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.

[stubbie]

And yet the bumble bee can fly ??