Roadster content: Have the garage ready for body work and paint job for
roadster II, the sequel: 1970 1600. What color should I paint it?
Steve Harvey
This is for all you eingineeer types (don't show it to your kids):
SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective
I. 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 house
hold, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least
one good child in each.
II. 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.
III. 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).
IV. 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 dead
stop
to 650 m.p.s.. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal 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.
V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now
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