Someone clearly had too much time on their hands...
>SANTA CLAUS
>AN ENGINEER'S PERSPECTIVE
>
>I) 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 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, that comes to
>108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.
>
>II) 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 967.7 visits per second. This is
>to say, that for every Christian household with a good child, Santa has
>around
>1/1000 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 purpose of our calculations). We are talking
>about
>1.25 Km per household, a total of 120.8 million Km, not counting bathroom
>stops or breaks. This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 1040 Km 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 43.8
>Km
>per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 25 Km per hour.
>
>III) The pay load of the sleigh adds another interesting element.
>Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium 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).
>
>IV) 600,000 tons traveling at 1040 Km per second creates enormous air
>resistance....this would heat up the lead 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 1040 k p s in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal 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 Jell-O.
>
>V) Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
THere you go..,.it's a bit long...sorry