Americans spend 1.2 billion dollars on Xmas trees. To provide these trees, 15,000 companies plant 450,000 acres with 2000 trees per acre for six to ten years, totalling 73 million trees, 28.6 million of which survive to be sold at an average cost of $40. Speed is so urgent in the harvest/market time that in the Pacific Northwest, 70% of the trees are transported to trucks by helicopter. As for artificial trees, 9.3 million are sold annually in America, 85% of which are manufactured in China, averaging $67 each. At the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich researchers are investigating genetic manipulations that would make trees glow with shades of red, green and blue.
In the 48 hours that Santa Claus technically has to deliver Xmas presents worldwide, he must visit an estimated 2.5 billion homes -- remember that he must visit naughty children too, and leave a lump of coal. Pagan, atheist and non-Christian children such as Jews and Moslems must be counted as naughty. For all this, Santa has only 34 microseconds available for each stop. To arrive at his destinations he must average 3604 miles per second, nearly two percent the speed of light. Einsteinian relativity is only a minor factor at these speeds, far too slight to explain the feat, and in any event problematic. Calculations by physicist Roger Penrose have suggested that in a universe where there are black holes, retrograde time travel is impossible, which closes another theoretical explanation. Perhaps the answer will be found at the quantum level.
I think that covers everything important. I haven't missed anything, have I? Nothing left out? No, of course not.
Merry Xmas, then.
J
13 comments:
Merry Christmas, Jack.
Happy Christmas Jack!
I heard today that the Star of Bethlehem may have been the triple conjunction of planets in our solar system, a rare occurrence. Pretty cool...
Well thank y'all kindly. And may you get more out of it than you put into it. That's what Christianity is about, after all, if you get my meaning.
J
Jack,
I'm a little late to wish you a merry CHRISTmas, but I hope you enjoyed your's, and a Happy New Year, too.
I don't mean to pick nits, well, maybe I do, but the only thing you forgot in your "Santa Analysis" is this: If he were really traveling at 3604mps inside an atmosphere, the air friction would cause him and all his reindeer to burst into flames.
Hmm. Flaming reindeer. Anyone have any barbeque sauce? ;P
I of course considered atmospheric friction, which would bring about combustion within 0.4 seconds, but immediately dismissed it as an irrelevance. Of course heat shielding would have been included in the original design of the Santa's sleigh. I postulate that Santa uses a transdimensional mode of travel, not unlike that postulated for UFOs, which perform aeronautic maneuvers impossible for objects functioning under normal physical laws. So there you go then.
J
Transdimensional huh? Does that mean the reindeer are anamatronic? I don't think hydraulic fluid would go very well with BarBQ sauce. A1 maybe?
TransDIMENSion, not transMISSion. Leave the Pep Boys out of it.
As for missing any Christmas wishes, I believe there a Christmas every few months, so catch me next time.
J
0.4 seconds. That would be interesting to watch. Though, I hope he has a good inertial canceler. Accelerating at 1000 miles per second per second tends to turn living things into, er, modern art. Yup, interesting to watch. Just, uh, let me go get a sponge and a spatula first.
Again, access to transdimensional physics would free Santa from such limits. I should think it's the only way to deal with the time problems. He must function within temporal parameters violently out of consonance with our own. This renders such pleasing little stories as small children watching Santa drink milk as highly unlikely, unless such interludes are planned. The metabolic demands on a merely or entirely physical being, to perform such work within such a timeframe, are insupportable.
It makes me wonder if there isn't some far greater, and perhaps more sinister, rational behind such sightings. What are we really being taught here. It's seems almost ... satanic. Believe in fairies, children. Believe in magik. God? Who needs God when there's a eldrich elf to provide all your wishes? Grim.
J
"Eldrich"? Jack, have you been reading H.P. Lovecraft? That seemed to be one of his favorite words.
On a serious physics note, I've been hearing rumors (probably baseless) that some hack college prof is trying to create a "localized breakdown of the laws of physics" (don't ask how, I didn't understand that part, it was optics and freqs) in order to make his own Higgs-Bosun particle, instead of using supercolliders like everyone else. I almost keep expecting to turn on my T.V. to news of a 50 kiloton explosion on some random campus. But, then again, it might work. Yeah, right.
See me 35 years ago for the source of eldrich. Took me a moment to remember how to spell it. I'm lost without spellchecker.
As for the rest, consult Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems. It's the standard alchemist's paradox -- lower order operations cannot effect higher order changes. Chemical processes cannot bring about subatomic results. Maybe that's not what's going on with this physicist. And we don't want to discourage new thinking. But, then again,
http://forgottenprophets.blogspot.com/2007/07/magic-lantern.html
J
Yeah, he may be a hack, but if he manages to succeed, well, I have the bad feeling that 50 kilotons may be a bit low compared to the actual energy release, like, by a magnitude of 10, depending on if it is actually a "universe" or not (quantum blowback? multiple universes all adding their own share of energy?). Then of course there is also the danger (however small) of that universe supplanting ours. But, I'm probably reading to much into it. After all, I'm sane (mostly) so I don't really understand quantum physics/particle physics interaction very well. I can occasionally do one or the other, but never both together wihtout turning into a gibbering idiot.
Yeah right. Whatever, dude.
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