Santa Claus: An Engineers Perspective

Santa Claus: An Engineers 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 poky 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
"flying" 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 traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
resistance --- this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a
spacecraft re-entering 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 centrifugal
forces of 17,500 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.*

[From TechRepublic
<http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=102&threadID=247874&st
art=0&tag=nl.e101> ]

Nationalized Healthcare Fails Again

One would be remiss to believe the same Kafkaesque bureaucracy would not occur here under a conceived Hillarycare.   Nationalized healthcare has disastrous effects.
 
 

Young mother condemned to die after doctors spend six months arguing about treatment funding
 
"I've just got to wait and see if they clear on their own. I've worked all my life and paid my taxes, but when I needed the NHS the most they abandoned me.
"The doctors have said that I can't go on having chemotherapy to treat the cancer, I will die if I don't get a bone marrow transplant. It was all down to money. It is so upsetting that a bureaucrat can decide whether people live or die."

Burglars Beware

As the Joe Horn case continues, a more clear cut home defense incident occurs:  http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5384332.html
 



 

The Computers We Use

Desktop computers and laptops are so ubiquitous these days that we often don't stop to think about the machines that we use everyday.

On average I use three different computers a day, not including checking email and webpages on my T-Mobile Dash smartphone.

I compiled a quick Power Point presentation based on the machines I use every day.

Compy/Lappy Presentation

Interesting Article about Flu season

An interesting article on the Flu season.

 

Study Shows Why the Flu Likes Winter

 

By GINA KOLATA

Published: December 5, 2007

 
Researchers in New York believe they have solved one of the great mysteries of the flu: Why does the infection spread primarily in the winter months?

Times Health Guide: The Flu

The answer, they say, has to do with the virus itself. It is more stable and stays in the air longer when air is cold and dry, the exact conditions for much of the flu season.
 
"Influenza virus is more likely to be transmitted during winter on the way to the subway than in a warm room," said Peter Palese, a flu researcher who is professor and chairman of the microbiology department at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and the lead author of the flu study.
 
Dr. Palese published details of his findings in the Oct. 19 issue of PLoS Pathogens. The crucial hint that allowed him to do his study came from a paper published in the aftermath of the 1918 flu pandemic, when doctors were puzzling over why and how the virus had spread so quickly and been so deadly.
 
As long as flu has been recognized, people have asked, Why winter? The very name, "influenza," is an Italian word that some historians proposed, originated in the mid-18th century as influenza di freddo, or "influence of the cold."
 
Flu season in northern latitudes is from November to March, the coldest months. In southern latitudes, it is from May until September. In the tropics, there is not much flu at all and no real flu season.
 
There was no shortage of hypotheses. Some said flu came in winter because people are indoors; and children are in school, crowded together, getting the flu and passing it on to their families.
 
Others proposed a diminished immune response because people make less vitamin D or melatonin when days are shorter. Others pointed to the direction of air currents in the upper atmosphere. But many scientists were not convinced.
 
"We know one of the largest factors is kids in school — most of the major epidemics are traced to children," said Dr. Jonathan McCullers, a flu researcher at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. "But that still does not explain wintertime. We don't see flu in September and October."
 
As for the crowding argument, Dr. McCullers said, "That never made sense." People work all year round and crowd into buses and subways and planes no matter what the season.
 
"We needed some actual data," Dr. McCullers added.
 
But getting data was surprisingly difficult, Dr. Palese said.
 
The ideal study would expose people to the virus under different conditions and ask how likely they were to become infected. Such a study, Dr. Palese said, would not be permitted because there would be no benefit to the individuals.
 
There were no suitable test animals. Mice can be infected with the influenza virus but do not transmit it. Ferrets can be infected and transmit the virus, but they are somewhat large, they bite and they are expensive, so researchers would rather not work with them.
 
To his surprise, Dr. Palese stumbled upon a solution that appeared to be a good second best.
 
Reading a paper published in 1919 in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the flu epidemic at Camp Cody in New Mexico, he came upon a key passage: "It is interesting to note that very soon after the epidemic of influenza reached this camp, our laboratory guinea pigs began to die." At first, the study's authors wrote, they thought the animals had died from food poisoning. But, they continued, "a necropsy on a dead pig revealed unmistakable signs of pneumonia."
 
Dr. Palese bought some guinea pigs and exposed them to the flu virus. Just as the paper suggested, they got the flu and spread it among themselves.
 
So Dr. Palese and his colleagues began their experiments.
 
By varying air temperature and humidity in the guinea pigs' quarters, they discovered that transmission was excellent at 41 degrees. It declined as the temperature rose until, by 86 degrees, the virus was not transmitted at all.
 
The virus was transmitted best at a low humidity, 20 percent, and not transmitted at all when the humidity reached 80 percent.
 
The animals also released viruses nearly two days longer at 41 degrees than at a typical room temperature of 68 degrees.
 
Flu viruses spread through the air, unlike cold viruses, Dr. Palese said, which primarily spread by direct contact when people touch surfaces that had been touched by someone with a cold or shake hands with someone who is infected, for example.
 
Flu viruses are more stable in cold air, and low humidity also helps the virus particles remain in the air. That is because the viruses float in the air in little respiratory droplets, Dr. Palese said. When the air is humid, those droplets pick up water, grow larger and fall to the ground.
 
But Dr. Palese does not suggest staying in a greenhouse all winter to avoid the flu. The best strategy, he says, is a flu shot.
 
It is unclear why infected animals released viruses for a longer time at lower temperatures. There was no difference in their immune response, but one possibility is that their upper airways are cooler, making the virus residing there more stable.
 
Flu researchers said they were delighted to get some solid data at last on flu seasonality.
 
"It was great work, and work that needed to be done," said Dr. Terrence Tumpe, a senior microbiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
 
Dr. McCullers said he was pleased to see something convincing on the flu season question.
 
"It was a really interesting paper, the first really scientific approach, to answer a classic question that we've been debating for years and years," he said.
 
As for Dr. Palese, he was glad he spotted the journal article that mentioned guinea pigs.
"Sometimes it pays to read the old literature," he said.