Collage 033               H u m o u r N e t                    1995

Okay, this one was sent to me a coupla weeks ago (thanks, Keith!),
but I couldn't decide what to do with it: (1) send it out now,
several weeks out of season, or (2) hang onto it until next Xmas.

Since my RAM refresh typically runs at about 1/10th spec, chances
are against my remembering about this come next season. So, here you
have it, Internetters, the "rebuttal" to the original Santa Physics
piece ("Did you ever stop to do the calculations?"), which was
forwarded via Spacenet in early December.

The original proposal is included for those of you who have similar
RAM-refresh problems ... the rebuttal follows.

Enjoy!

- Vince Sabio
  HumourNet Moderator
  HumourNet@telephonet.com
____________________________________________________________________
          Opener (above) Copyright 1995 by Vincent Sabio
  Permission is hereby granted to forward or post this "Collage";
  please observe the guidelines stated at the end of the message.
____________________________________________________________________

Subject:  Santa Physics...the whole story. (a bit late)

THE ORIGINAL "SANTA PHYSICS" PROPOSAL:

1) No known species of reindeer can fly.  BUT there are 300,000
species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of
these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out
flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world.
BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish
and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total
- 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau.  At an
average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8
million homes.  One presumes there's at least one good child in
each.

3) 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 (which seems logical).  This works out to 822.6
visits per second.  This is to say that for each Christian household
with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out
of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute
the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been
left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on
to the next house.  Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops
are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know
to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will
accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total
trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of
us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

This means that 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 on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at
a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run,
tops, 15 miles per hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element.
Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego
set(2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting
Santa, who is invariably described as overweight.  On land,
conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds.  Even
granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES
the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine.
We need 214,200 reindeer.  This increases the payload - not even
counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons.  Again, for
comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous
air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion
as spacecraft re-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 create deafening sonic booms
in their wake.  The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within
4.26 thousandths of a second.  Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected
to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity.  A
250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to
the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve,
he's dead now.

===========================================================
			REBUTTAL
===========================================================

Recently there was a debate-style posting in rec.humor.funny given a
proposition:  IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS?  A friend of mine to whom I
passed it along emailed me the note below and asked me to post it
for him...

Rebuttal: Several key points are overlooked by this callous,
amateurish "study."

1) Flying reindeer:  As is widely known (due to the excellent
historical documentary "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," the flying
reindeer are not a previously unknown species of reindeer, but were
in fact given the power of flight due to eating magic acorns.  As is
conclusively proven in "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" (a no
punches pulled look at life in Santa's village), this ability has
bred true in subsequent generations of reindeer - obviously the
magic acorns imprinted their power on a dominant gene sequence
within the reindeer DNA strand.

2) Number of households:  This figure overlooks two key facts.
First of all, the first major schism in the Church split the Eastern
Churches, centered in Byzantium, from the Western, which remained
centered in Rome.  This occurred prior to the Gregorian correction
to the Julian calendar.  The Eastern churches (currently called
Orthodox Churches) do not recognize the Gregorian correction for
liturgical events, and their Christmas is as a result several days
after the Western Churches'.  Santa gets two shots at delivering
toys.

Secondly, the figure of 3.5 children per household is based on the
gross demographic average, which includes households with no
children at all.  The number of children per household, when figured
as an average for households with children, would therefore have to
be adjusted upward.  Also, the largest single Christian denomination
is Roman Catholic, who, as we all know, breed like rabbits.  If you
don't believe me, ask my four brothers and two sisters - they'll
back me up.  Due to the predominance of Catholics within Christian
households, the total number of households containing Christian
children would have to be adjusted downward to reflect the
overloading of Catholics beyond a standard deviation from the
median.

Also, the assertion that each home would contain at least one good
child would be reasonable enough if there were in fact an even 3.5
children per household.  However, since the number of children per
household is distributed integrally, there are a significant number
(on the order of several million) of one child Christian households.
Even though only children are notoriously spoiled and therefore
disproportionately inclined towards being naughty, since it's the
holidays we'll be generous and give them a fifty-fifty chance of
being nice.  This removes one half of the single child households
from Santa's delivery schedule, which has already been reduced by
the removal of the Orthodox households from the first delivery run.

3) Santa's delivery run (speed, payload, etc.)
    These all suffer from the dubious supposition that there is only
one Santa Claus.  The name "Santa" is obviously either Spanish or
Italian, two ethnic groups which are both overwhelmingly Catholic.
The last name Claus suggests a joint German/Italian background.  His
beginnings, battling the Burgermeister Meisterburger, suggest he
grew up in Bavaria (also predominantly Catholic).  The Kaiser style
helmets of the Burgermeister's guards, coupled with the relative
isolation of the village, suggest that his youth was at the very
beginning of Prussian influence in Germany.  Thus, Santa and Mrs.
Claus have been together for well over one hundred years.  If you
think that after a hundred years of living at the North Pole with
nights six months long that they remain childless, you either don't
know Catholics or are unaware of the failure rate of the rhythm
method.  There have therefore been over five generations of Clauses,
breeding like Catholics for over one hundred years.  Since they are
Catholic, their exponential population increase would obviously have
a gain higher than the world population as a whole.  There have
therefore been more than enough new Santas to overcome the
population increase of the world.  So in fact, Santa has an easier
time of it now than he did when he first started out.

Santa dead, indeed - some people will twist any statistic to "prove"
their cynical theory.

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