11/11/2007
The healer
This elderly couple is watching one of those television preachers on TV one night. The preacher faces the camera, and announces, "My friends, I'd like to share my healing powers with everyone watching this program. Place one hand on top of your TV & the other hand on the part of your body which ails you & I will heal you." The old woman has been having terrible stomach problems, so she places one hand on the television, and her other hand on her stomach. Meanwhile, her husband approaches the television, placing one hand on top of the TV and his other hand on his groin. With a frown his wife says, "Ernest, he's talking about healing the sick, not raising the dead."
Santa statistics
No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are roughly 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified. While most of these are insects and germs, this does not rule out flying reindeer - though Santa and my uncle Ralph, in his drinking days, are the only people who've ever seen one.
There are two billion children (small people under the age of 18) in the world. But since Santa doesn't (appear to) handle most non-Christian children, that reduces the workload to about 15 per cent of the total (roughly 378 million according to the Population Reference Bureau). At a rate of say, 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good kid in each.
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. That's 822.6 visits per second. For each eligible household, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, put presents under the tree, eat any snacks, kiss mommy when available, get back up the chimney, hop in the sleigh and move on.
Assuming each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth, we're now talking about 0.78 miles per household - a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to let Santa and the reindeer do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours.
This means Santa's sleigh moves at 650 miles per second, or 3,000 times the speed of sound. The fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles a second (a conventional reindeer, by the way, can run 15 miles per hour, tops).
Assuming each child gets nothing more that a medium-sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting overweight Santa. Conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting flying reindeer could pull 10 times the normal amount, Santa would need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload (not counting the sleigh) to
353,430 tons, or four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth II.
353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles a second creates enormous air resistance, which would heat the reindeer to incandescence in the same fashion as spacecraft or meteors entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing
the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms. The entire team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.
Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500.06 gravities. A 250-pound Santa (a wee bit of an underestimate) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
The Internet originator's conclusion to the above: "If Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now."
There are two billion children (small people under the age of 18) in the world. But since Santa doesn't (appear to) handle most non-Christian children, that reduces the workload to about 15 per cent of the total (roughly 378 million according to the Population Reference Bureau). At a rate of say, 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good kid in each.
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. That's 822.6 visits per second. For each eligible household, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, put presents under the tree, eat any snacks, kiss mommy when available, get back up the chimney, hop in the sleigh and move on.
Assuming each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth, we're now talking about 0.78 miles per household - a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to let Santa and the reindeer do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours.
This means Santa's sleigh moves at 650 miles per second, or 3,000 times the speed of sound. The fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles a second (a conventional reindeer, by the way, can run 15 miles per hour, tops).
Assuming each child gets nothing more that a medium-sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting overweight Santa. Conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting flying reindeer could pull 10 times the normal amount, Santa would need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload (not counting the sleigh) to
353,430 tons, or four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth II.
353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles a second creates enormous air resistance, which would heat the reindeer to incandescence in the same fashion as spacecraft or meteors entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing
the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms. The entire team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.
Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500.06 gravities. A 250-pound Santa (a wee bit of an underestimate) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
The Internet originator's conclusion to the above: "If Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now."
The bottle and the bomb
3 people were on a plane. One said to the pilot, "I have a glass bottle. What do I do with it?" The pilot told him to throw it out the window. The second one asked the same question and the pilot also told him to throw it out the window. The third one asked the pilot, "I have a bomb. What do I do with it?" The pilot told him to throw it out the window. When they landed they met a man crying. When asked why he was crying, he replied, "Because I got hit in the head with a glass bottle. They met a woman who was crying for the same reason. Then the met a man laughing. They asked him why he was laughing and he replied, "Because I walked by a building and farted. Then the building blew up.
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