Countless artistic minds have created their own responses to the phenomenon of Christmas.
I’d like to share two of my favourites.
The first is an audio play first broadcast by the BBC several years ago dealing with the response to the “true love” who sends the famous partridge in a pear tree. The script by Brian Sibley is brilliantly read by Penelope Keith. Enjoy “Yet another partridge in a pear tree”.
The second deals with the mathematics and science of the Santa character - regrettably, I am unable to name the original author (but this version came from here).
The mathematics of Christmas
So the story goes….a portly gentlemen dressed in an elaborate red dressing gown affair has tamed a bunch of elves and reindeer and controlled their will. The Elves must be at the forefront of just-in-time production in order to create a production line capable of producing just about any toy. Heaven knows what volume of patent, copyright and trade mark infringement this presents. For the Reindeer it means a level of training that would make Dolph Lundgren’s Rocky 3 workout look like a walk in the park. Below we tackle some of the issues presented by the story of Santa…
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.
4. 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 etc.
5. 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.
6. 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 anoint, 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.
7. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance – this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy.
Per second.
Each.
8. 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.
So, we are struggling to understand how Santa does it.
Must be magic.
Merry Christmas.
Credits:
Xmas maths via http://www.gallery.je/santa
Audio for Penelope Keith reading “Yet another partridge in a pear tree” http://kazza.id.au/files/AndyetAnotherPartridgeinaPearTree.mp3
Text of “Yet another partridge in a pear tree” is available at http://briansibleytheworks.blogspot.com/2008/01/blog-post.html
Santa image: http://www.vectorarts.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/christmas-santa-claus.jpg
Audio image:
http://onsug.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/ambient-adventures-icon.png
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