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Thread ID: 64200	2005-12-07 02:29:00	Do you believe in Santa ?	KiwiTT_NZ (233)	PC World Chat

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
410908	2005-12-07 07:20:00	Only 6 more sleeps till XMAS if your a P user. :nerd:	EX-WESTY (221)
410909	2005-12-07 07:21:00	I never did the tell the kids lies about this guy. My sister in law had a problem one year, the kids had "been good" but didn't get there thing they wanted and there was a huge fuss. With my son we always asked him for a list and crossed off the totally outrageous stuff explaining we weren't that rich - or magicians. He never minded. Even now, he is 27 - he still doesn't think it was a bad thing to have done.	pctek (84)
410910	2005-12-07 07:27:00	I was a modern kid - Santa came in a helicopter. :p I remember one Christmas Eve, lying in bed but still awake and a helicopter flew right over and didn't stop ... Poor parents had a very upset child to deal with who thought Santa hadn't stopped because I was still awake - they had a good time trying to explain their way out of that one :rolleyes:	Jen (38)
410911	2005-12-07 08:11:00	Santa Claus:An Engineers 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 house hold, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each. II. 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 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 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. III. 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 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 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 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 pound or 114 Kg Santa 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, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.	Eric (378)
410912	2005-12-07 08:42:00	Santa Claus™ love the Trademark! :lol:	andrew93 (249)
410913	2005-12-07 08:50:00	Change centrifugal to inertial and it sounds about right, though it is fair to say that at those speeds it would be hard to keep Santa, his sleigh, the reindeer, and all, from leaving the atmosphere and going on a one-way interstellar journey. Centrifugal force could have something to do with that, but it is inertia at lift-off that will squeeze his toothpaste. Thank heavens most of the work is now done by millions of press-ganged "Santa's little helpers" on local contracts. All the big guy has to do now is chill out and bask in the love and affection of all those kids. Cheers Billy 8-{) :D	Billy T (70)
410914	2005-12-07 09:20:00	We were so poor that on Christmas eve my father would go outside and fire the shotgun, then come in and sadly announce that Santa had committed suicide and that there would be no presents that year. Sigh.....	godfather (25)
410915	2005-12-07 09:48:00	Santa Claus:An Engineers Perspective Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now. For me I believe! In the event you happen to be correct then I will feel very sad come 25th Dec 2005. Especially since I had my narrow chimney so much in vogue these days remodelled to accomodate Santa. I'm very lucky to have a chimney at all. In some places in NZ they would have you remove them and go to alternative sources for heat. I also moved from an A frame house to a house with a roof that does not have a steep pitch so Santa would have an easy landing. :-) Are you telling all my efforts have been in vain? Next year I am not going to be GOOD. What would be the point?	Elephant (599)
410916	2005-12-07 09:51:00	We were so poor that on Christmas eve my father would go outside and fire the shotgun, then come in and sadly announce that Santa had committed suicide and that there would be no presents that year. "You had a house! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling." :lol: www.phespirit.info	andrew93 (249)
410917	2005-12-07 10:04:00	We were so poor that on Christmas eve my father would go outside and fire the shotgun, then come in and sadly announce that Santa had committed suicide and that there would be no presents that year. Sigh..... In those days the price of one shotgun shell today would have bought all that went in my Christmas stocking. OTOH we had less expectations. A bag of marbles, a top, a few sweets and all the Family got together. These days children appear to have Ipods and cellphones at the top of the list. I can't blame my Dad. He was bringing in twenty pounds a week back in 1952 and that was not a bad wage back then. That's $40 for those that don't remember anything prior to 1967.	Elephant (599)
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