I sit here watching my chimney patiently. If anything fat and jolly is to be invading my house this evening, it dern well better come right out and show itself. I'm getting a little tired of all these "magical" people that do stuff when I'm not looking. Maybe it's a self-esteem issue but seriously Santa, you wouldn't be so stinkin' fat if you'd lay off the Christmas Candy a bit.
I've been thinking a lot about this whole Santa issue today. I like to take a look at things as rationally and scientifically as possible, so lets have a looksee at the physics of Santas ride, shall we?
There are approx. 2 billion children (<18) in the world. Taking out some eastern and Muslim, Hindu, Bhuddist and Jewish persons, we'll rule out 15% of the total children in the world. At an average census rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. For the sake of our calculations, we'll assume there's at least one good child in each.
The Jolly One has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the rotation of the earth and assuming he travels east to west. This means he has 822.6 household stops per second. So this lard-A is stopping, getting out of his sleigh, getting down the chimney, distributing presents, eating candy, getting back up the chimney, in his sleigh, and off again in 1/1000th of a second.
Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed, this gives Santa a whopping 75.5 million miles to cover in 31 hours (not counting any bathroom breaks, and since Santa's reindeer are all female, you KNOW he's got to have those.) This pushes Santa's speed to roughly 650 miles per second, or, around 300 times the speed of sound. A conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles an hour.
Now for the fun part. Assuming every child gets no more than a medium sized lego set (2 pounds) the sleigh, minus reindeer and overweight coachman, would weigh around 321,300 tons. Assuming that magical flying reindeer can pull TEN TIMES the payload of normal reindeer, we still need not 8 or 9, but around 214,200 reindeer.
353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles a second would create massive air resistance. The lead pair of reindeer would look like a re-entering space shuttle and absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy...per second...per reindeer, creating a deafining sonic boom as they expose the reindeer behind them. The entire team will be vaporized in 4.26 thousandths of a second, and a 250 pound skinny santa would be pinned to his sleigh by a mere 4,315,015 pounds of cintrifugal force.
I'm a big fan of Santa, but if he can pull this off, he needs to get out of his icy fortress of solitude and teach us a lesson or two in metaphysics.
I'm going to go to bed now and make sure I don't miss my 1/1000th of a second!
(Some material violently stolen from websites around the world, including the "church of free thinkers.")