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The story of a homeless binge drinker — 19 Comments

    • Except that I'll bet it will be shown in every primary skool in the country, over the next few days…

      • I think they have a 12 rating on it.  It'd scare the shite out of the Santa-believers and provide a sneer for the non-believers.  I don't think they thought that one through?

  1. This on the day after news came in about the Antarctic being colder than it's ever been … and the ice cap in the north is growing at a fair old lick too, apparently. Greenpeace may have started off as a worthy project years ago but it's morphed into something quite distasteful in recent years. Those daft GP buggers currently in chokey in Russia deserve everything they're getting too; you prod a bear with a stick long enough what the bloody hell do you think it's going to do?

    • I saw that.  Lowest temperature ever recorded on the planet.

      Greenpeace has become a religious movement.  They run on faith, not facts.

      • No I reckon Greenpeace is a non-govermental-but-isn't-really organisation. The only question is which government?

      • The only one of the original founders of Greenpeace who is a scientist (Patrick Moore, an enviromentalist to boot!) cut all ties back in the eighties because he was sickened by the enviro-loonies who had taken control and completely perverted the aims of the organisation, using junk science as justification.

        Greenpeace have now, in true 1984 Orwellian style, tried to alter history by claiming he was never a founder and is not even a proper scientist… Despite the fact that their own website had listed him as a co-founder until 2007.

  2. Santa Claus: An engineer's 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 pokey 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 Oflying¹ 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 travelling at 650 miles per second crates enormous air resistance < this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth¹s 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 vaporised 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 a milli-second, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 G¹s. 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.

    V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.

     

    • Quantum entanglement allows him to simultaneously visit all houses at the same time. He is however getting up there in years and is considering giving the delivery portion of the job to Amazon, but only if the paint the nose cone of the drones red. 

      I just wish he had not subcontracted the naughty and nice list to the NSA. 

       

    • If Santa reduces his acceleration time even further then he’ll not be subjected to the same G forces, ie if the time approaches zero seconds he’ll be at full speed before his body has had time to be crushed. The sleigh would also need a heat shield, like the space ship from Sunshine, or a red nose will be the least of the forward propulsion nacelle’s worries. Kelly Johnson himself couldn’t build it; a better plan would be to convince householders to act as delivery agents and get them to pay themselves with a dead bird, the Great Escape, and a bottle of gin, plus of course the smiles of their offspring.

  3. I loved the soot-smears on Santa's ermine facings to his robes, no doubt caused by the odorless, colorless gas CO2!

    • That's from all the thousands of cigars that kind fathers leave out for Santa.  Smoke ten thousand cigars simultaneously and there is bound to be some collateral damage?

  4. Kids… Please ask for money and send it to Santa so he can live in a beach house in California like Al Gore does…

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