Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 13:32:45 -0500
Reply-To: Phil Rack <PhilRack@MINEQUEST.COM>
Sender: "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From: Phil Rack <PhilRack@MINEQUEST.COM>
Subject: Re: Christmas calculations
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1250"
Paul,
Santa's secret to success is obvious. He has perfected the use of wormholes
to travel through space and time. A new breed of analysts are now trying to
determine if he using a flux capacitor on his sleigh.
Phil Rack
MineQuest, LLC
SAS Consulting and Contract Programming
3021 Bethel Rd., Ste 200
Columbus, OH 43220
Tel: (614) 457-3714
E-Mail: Philrack@MineQuest.com
http://www.minequest.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Choate, Paul@DDS [mailto:pchoate@DDS.CA.GOV]
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 12:40 PM
To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: OT: Christmas calculations
WHY ANALYSTS TAKE THE FUN OUT OF CHRISTMAS
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, which comes to
108 million homes, presuming there is at least 1 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 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
stocking, 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 or
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 (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 can pull 10 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).
A mass of nearly 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, vaporizing
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 miles/second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to
acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems
ludicrously slim considering all the high calorie snacks he must have
consumed over the years) 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 ever did
exist, he's dead now.
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