Those that believe in Santa may not like this joke so it is in a code block.
A bit of a lengthy joke
An engineers analysis of Santa:
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 (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 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 West to
East (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 stocking, 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 onto 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 we'll
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 can pull 10
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 it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating
from a dead stop to 650 mps in .001 seconds, would be subjected to
acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which
seemsludicrously 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, we conclude that Santa is probably not real, and if Santa
did exist, he's dead now.
Their is a rebuttal for this joke, but parts of the rebuttal are a bit
confusing so I will not post it here.
Regards,
1tg46
Reality is an illusion brought on by the absence of alcohol-do not take literally
