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 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 cr e ates 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.

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

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YAAKOV'S CAMPUS CORNER

(Rabbi Yaakov Singer joined our North American Fellowships staff this past summer as our Campus Coordinator.  If you are currently in college and would like to get more involved in our campus programming, please contact him by email at ysinger@aish.edu, or call him toll free at  877-472-5412. Yaakov will be a regular contributor to our Jerusalem Follow-up Newsletter)

The pull of the business world is a strong one. We have to choose the right university, get the right major and high grades. We have to network properly, get into the right corporation for good money, and be upwardly mobile.

There is not much time left to look out for the little guy, care for a friend, or ask how we can help those in need.

The story of Joseph and his brothers is a striking example of where our priorities need to be. Joseph had been sold by his brothers into slavery and nonetheless had become the second most powerful man in all of Egypt. Amidst a great famine in the land, he was overseeing the apportionment of food to all the people. Busy? He was feeding a nation. Enter his brothers. They arrive looking to purchase food. The Torah says that Joseph "recognized his brothers." Sure it had been a while since they had been together, but recognizing his brothers was not such a great feat. The Midrash explains that this is alluding to Joseph's compassionate response to his brothers' plight. Here he was running a country that was in a state of crisis. Yet, he took the time not only to give his brothers food, but also to do all that was necessary to reunite his family. He orchestrated an intricate series of events in order that his brothers could right the injustice they had done to him in a dignified manner. Then he personally saw to it that Jacob's entire family settled peacefully in Goshen. Joseph dropped everything to take care of his family.

Joseph teaches us what our priority needs to be. It's not the extra dollar or the accolades. We have to be sensitive to the needs of those around us. We have to care.

Those of us who have been to Israel and have had a Fellowships experience have something valuable that we can share with our peers on campus. The majority of Jewish students on campus would love to see Israel. They would love to get a taste of the beauty of the Jewish people. They simply do not know where to start. They are our roommates, our classmates, and our friends.

Let's offer them the same opportunity we have had, to explore our Jewish heritage in Israel.
 
Happy Chanukah,

Yaakov Singer

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Inspiration (From the Aish Chanuka Web-Site)