RE: [amsat-bb] JOFM02 Keps?

["Bill Greene VE7WFG" <bgreene@xxxxxxxxx>]

Happy Holidays Tom,

Another unexplained phenomena ! Just goes to show you the level of magic
involved with Christmas !

I passed some of your comments on to two of my grandchildren, there
response was " Mr. Clark is wrong.....he better be careful grandpa,
Santa does not like that kind of talk " ! So anyhow Tom I thought I
would pass the thoughts of a 4 and 5 year old on to you !

Hope Santa lightens his load at my place !!!!

Take care and Merry Christmas !


73 de VE7WFG 

Bill 
Armstrong BC 
DO00jk



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-AMSAT-BB@AMSAT.Org [mailto:owner-AMSAT-BB@AMSAT.Org] On
Behalf Of Tom Clark, W3IWI
Sent: December 24, 2002 9:38 AM
To: 'Mike Murphree'; 'Les Alverson'
Cc: amsat-bb@AMSAT.Org
Subject: RE: [amsat-bb] JOFM02 Keps?


A Rocket Scientist's Analysis of the Santa Claus legend:



1. 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.


2. 	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 or 0.346% of the speed of light. For
purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space
probe, moves at a mere 43.8 Km per second, and a conventional reindeer
can run (at best) 25 Km per hour.

3. 	The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element.
Assuming
that each child gets nothing more than a medium Lego set (two pounds or
nearly 1 kG), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not
counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no
more than 300 pounds, and 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).

4. 	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 reddish pink (HO HO HO!)
goo.

5.	Therefore I conclude, if Santa did exist in the past, he's very
dead now.

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