===The Truth About Santa===

Well, 'tis the season to spread cheer and all, so I figured what better way to spread seasonal joy than to let you know how the man himself, ol' Saint Nick, gets it done. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I thought as a child, and I wondered how in the heck Santa did what he did. But when I became a man, I put away childish things. And I got me a big calculator to figure it out for myself.

I'm sending this out to spread cheer and all, but if you got this, and don't want anything like this in your email, be sure to let me know (and if I accidentally sent this twice, sorry. I've been having a little bit of problems over here). depending on how much free time I have, I may re-start my once proud mailing of jokes, or mindless rants, or whatever else is on my mind, and if you don't want to get them, please tell me that, too. (Come on, send me something! y'all know how much I like mail!)

So, anyhow, from all of us, as we say out here in the world of rednecks, "Seeeezin's Greetin's, Y'all!!!"

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As everyone knows, Santa Claus delivers presents to all good boys and girls on Christmas night, aided by his magical flying reindeer. The real question is how he does it. The following is a sample of what happens to a person with too much free time, and a ready calculator.

I. There are approximately two billion children (People under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist religions, this reduces the Christmas workload right down to 15% of that 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's 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 goes from 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, 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 we know to be false, but let's accept it for our calculations), we're talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom breaks or stops. This means that Santa's sleigh has to travel at 2,340,000 miles per hour, or 650 miles per second. That's 12 times the speed of light, and over 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) about 15 miles an hour.

III. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Even if each child on Santa's trip got nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500,000 tons, not counting the weight of the sleigh, or Santa himself. On land, an ordinary reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that a magical, flying reindeer can pull ten times that much, the job can't be done eight or even nine of them--Santa would need 360,000 flying reindeer. This increases the weight of the sleigh another 54,000 tons or so, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

IV. 600,000 tons (1,200,000,000 pounds, if you're keeping track) traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance-- this would heat up the reindeer much like a spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere. the lead pair of reindeer would absorb about 14.3 quintillion (14,300,000,000,000,000,000) 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 (all 360,000) would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.

V. Not that this matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 miles per second in 1/10,000 of a second, would be subjected to a centrifugal force of 17,500 G's (about 6000 times what astronauts face). a 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim, if you want to think about it) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by about 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones, and reducing him to quivering pink goo.

VI. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.


Happy Holidays!

-------------the SpaceCow-----------------------------
=== "I drive waaay too fast to worry about cholesterol" ===