Monday, December 18, 2006

How does he do that?


I found these amazing stats on Jakes Blog
They are thoughts and musings from C.S. Lewis' short story "Exmas and Christmas"

....Assuming that each child has nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting St. Nicholas 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 --- St. Nicholas 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).600,000 tons travelling 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 St. Nicholas reached the fifth house on his trip. Not thatit matters, however, since St. Nicholas, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 mps in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 G’s. A 250 pound St. Nicholas (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantlycrushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

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