There are approximately two billion children (persons under 10 in the
world.)

However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish
or Buddhist religions (except maybe in Japan), 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 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.

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 travelling at 650 miles per second creates
enormous air resistance--this would heat up the reindeer in the same
fashion as a space shuttle 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 acceleration 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.

Merry Christmas.

***

Late as a freight...

http://www.prince.org/msg/100/171423

...



"A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every Twenty-fifth of December!"
~Ebenezer Scrooge

tAC (aka theAntiClaus)

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

shit! i didn't notice!! feel free to remove this thread if need be. sowwies

But Santa always answers my letters

luv4u said:

i clicked and nothing happened. MORE PROOF!!...or was i just PWN3D?

DynamicSavior said:

Naw, the more Bah-Humbug the better.




"A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every Twenty-fifth of December!"
~Ebenezer Scrooge

tAC (aka theAntiClaus)

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

Mr. and Mrs. Clause



The elves



And Rudolph the red nose reindeer

in the ghetto we have Rudy the red-eyed pitbull.

Anxiety said:

chug! chug! chug!

I Rudolph!!
[Edited 12/25/05 9:20am]