Newsgroup: it.fan.startrek
Titolo: dedicato agli ingegneri del NG :-) (OT Natalizio)

Santa Claus: An Engineers Perspective
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 1 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, 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 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, jump
into
the sleigh and get on 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 around 0.78 miles
per
household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom
stops
or breaks. This means Santa 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 that a medium sized Lego set (two
pounds), the
sleigh is carrying over 500,000 tons, not counting Santa himself. On
land, a
conventional reindeer can 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 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
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 is 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 he 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.

 Santa Claus: An Engineers Perspective
Grazie, cercavo l'inglese originale ma non l'ho mai trovato... :-)
[Quello in italiano l'avevano postata proprio su questo gruppo, ma
evidentemente con l'X-No-Archive, dato che né su Deja né su Google
l'ho mai più ritrovata]
Ciao,
 Emmanuele.
-- 
Emmanuele Bassi (Zefram)              [ 
http://digilander.iol.it/ebassi/
 ]
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