:)
Travis
At 02:03 PM 12/11/95 GMT, Chris Golya wrote:
>Could resist sending this
>
>IS THERE still A SANTA CLAUS?
>
>As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help
>from that renown scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990) - I am
>pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.
>
>1) 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.
>
>2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT
>since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and
>Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 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.
>
>3) 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 .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 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.
>
>4) 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 anount, 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.
>
>5) 353,000 tons travelling 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 dead now.
>
>Chris Golya
>School of Art, Design & Media
>University of Portsmouth
>
>I would tell you that music is the expression of emotion
>And that politics is merely the decoy of perception.
>The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy
>
>
>
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Just a Baby Frog...
Travis Brinster POLLIWOG
tbrinst@primenet.com 415 S. Wilson
Tempe, AZ 85281
USA
"The first human being that hurled an insult instead of a stone
was the father of civilization."
-Sigmund Freud
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