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>Hello all- Happy Holidays!
>
>I believe that you will all enjoy this one. This was forwarded to me.
>"An Porsche German Engineer's take on 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 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 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 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.
>
>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 thousands 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 the Spaceshuttle
>reentering 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 acceleration forces of 17,000 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 pink goo.
>
>Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
>Merry Christmas



Samuel W. Clough
Invesco Retirement Plan Services
404-575-3571