Santa Claus: An Engineer's Perspective

Since I haven't posted in a very long time, I thought that maybe I should post something humours. My Physics teacher gave us this... (that is who you should thank/blame)

WARNING: If you believe that Santa exists, do not read farther!

There are approximately 1.74 billion children (15 years of age and younger) 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 about 38% of the total, or 660 million.

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 3000 visits/second, assuming two children per home. This is to say that for each Christmas household with a good child, Santa has about 1/3000th 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 330 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purpose of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.8 mile between homes; a 11,830 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 mi/s, and a conventional reindeer can run 15 mi/h.

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child receives two pounds worth of gifts, the sleigh is carring over 660,000 tons. On land, a reindeer could pull as much as 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job cannot be done with eight or even nine of them - Santa would need 440,000 of them! The entire load, including the reindeer, weigh 726,000 tons or roughly sixteen times the weight of the Titanic!

In addition, 726,000 tons traveling at 2370 mi/s creates enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 186 quintillion J/s 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 3 ten-thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the second house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 4740 mi/s in 0.00017 second, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 4.6 billion g's. A 250 pound Santa would be pined to the back of the sleigh by 1.14 trillion pounds of force (that is, if the sleigh had sufficient structural integrity to withstand the acceleration - which is ludicrous!), instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing hm to a quivering blob of pink goo.

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

Going to Switzerland

Juliet statue in Verona, Italy

Market place

Traveling to Lucern Switzerland.

More pretty landscape.

The church.

Even more pictures of Venice! (Will I ever be done?)

So, three out of my six cousins from Michigan came down to Iowa for our great-uncle's funeral. They came and rode our ponies. It was funny. Seth's feet almost touched the ground. I'll have to put pictures up when, if ever, I'm finished putting up pictures of my summer! We didn't have school on Thursday and Friday because of a teachers in service and the funeral was on Wednesday, so I had a 5 day weekend. I am not looking forward to going back to school. Not even mentioning the school work I'll need to catch up on... I have the house to myself! Bwahahaha (but only for a little while)! I will soon have to go over to itchellmeh's and babysit Dillan. Remember in Italy when the other tour group got it's bus stolen!? And Athena and Kim got kissed by an Italian guy? I wore jeans that day becuase they said that we were going in a religious site and it turned out to be optional. It was really hot that day and we spent forever there. Bathrooms were a euro. The really cool stair case outside the palace! Woohoo! Carvings on the end of the really cool stair case The one really weird clock in the town square. Random tall building in the square. The alleyway to the glass blower shop. The glass blowers made astounding figures. The first one he made was a vase, the second, a horse. I wish I had cought a video of him since none of my picutres turned out really well. Hannah finally catching a pigeon. I have a ton of really cool pictures I wish I could add. More pigeons... Will the pigeons never end? Cute little boy with pigeon. Our gondolier. All of us in the gondola. The grand canal. Me in the mask I got Sarah.

Elisabeth and Hanna infront of a small stall.

Venice Italy!!!

Hey! So in Jr. NICYO, we are playing Farondole (Bizet). But of course, our version is arranged, so it is different, easier. I hate it. I would rather play the real thing. Yesterday, I had a Sr. RCYF (teenager church group) grill out. I played with our group leader's little girl.

Part of our actual deck in our hotel in Italy. Our rooms were on the roof. Our "deck" was the roof of the hotel. The view was amazing (see previous post). Elisabeth and I shared a room and Paula and Hannah shared a room connected to ours. But of course, by the second night, everybody but me had dragged their mattress onto the deck. I slept with the window and door open. A sail boat on the water that we had to cross to get to Venice.
Paula and Hannah on our boat. Cool buildings of Venice seen by the boat. A canal. The really cool statue were we started our whisper headset tour. The courtyard of the palace. The really cool staircase with statues on top!

Going up the golden "ambassador's" staircase.

I remember this... I had to change both my camera battery and my memory chip.

Notice the golden glow of the stair case in the back ground. I unfortunately do not have any more pictures of the inside of this palace because we could not take any pictures in the rest of it. We did go to the dungeon though, it was actually fairly well light.

Innsbruck to arrival in Italy!

Did I tell you I am now a gymnastics coach? I think I have. One of the kids asked me if I had any kids. When I said no, she said that I should have some. How would you respond? Tonight was '50's night at church. So I handed out handfuls of chips this year. After the Italian Dinner, I always try not to get the serving job. Last year I think I served though. Hannah stuck under her seat. On the bus ride to Austria. More pretty scenery.

Hanna and I in Innsbruck Austria. We stopped there briefly for quick sight seeing, shopping, and going in Swarovski. Pretty designs on the building.

Paula, Elisabeth, me, and Hannah in a tree in a park.

My favorite living statue! Amazing crystals at Swarovski. A church that Hanna and I stopped at. Leaving Innsbruck, we are heading to Italy. We took a brief stop at a McDonald's, were you had to tip to use the bathrooms. Italy has very pretty scenery. Lots of mountains and vineyards.

The view off or hotel in Italy.

Munich to Dachou and back to Munich

In Drawing II, we are doing either space scenes or underwater scenes with hog markers. To all the city kids out there, hog markers are very messy, bigger versions of oil pastels (sort of). In case you didn't figure it out, they are used to mark livestock. I am going to do a sea scene with an octopus, shark, seahorse, and some fishies. In Mexican History, we are going to use clay to carve our names in hieroglyphics. I hate flies. I hate crickets. James is at a cross country meet. I don't think I've ever mentioned my new schedule. Study Hall, Gym (with a new teacher who actually makes us do stuff), Homeroom, Physics, Calculus, Statistics, Drawing II, Mexican History, and College Prep English. You guys need to come down and ride our ponies! We now have free time in Munich! This is the fish fountain that we had to meet at. This is the really cool church/town hall/what ever it was that was by the fountain. The carvings were incredible. Me imitating a statue with Mike's sword. A really cool statue of a knight spearing something. Really cool clock/church. The statue in the middle of the compound at Dachou. A prisoners jacket. A model of the compound before they tore down some of the barracks. Bunks.
More bunks.

Lockers.

A wash station. The crematorium. Arbeit Macht Frei. Paula, Elisabeth, Hannah, and me eating ice cream in a park in Munich after Dachou.

Kim and Elisabeth at the Hard Rock Cafe in Munich.