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For the briefest of moments, I thought TSN said "perverts." I got the mental image of shopping mall Santa Claus molesting the elves.

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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.

If every one of the 91.8 million homes with good children were to put out a single chocolate chip cookie and an 8 ounce glass of 2% milk, the total calories (needless to say other vitamins and minerals) would be approximately 225 calories (100 for the cookie, give or take, and 125 for the milk, give or take). Multiplying the number of calories per house by the number of homes (225 x 91.8 x 1000000), we get the total number of calories Santa consumes that night, which is 20,655,000,000 calories. To break it down further, 1 pound is equal to 3500 calories. Dividing our total number of calories by the number of calories in a pound (20655000000/3500) and we get the number of pounds Santa gains, 5901428.6, which is 2950.7 tons.

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If Santa moves at the relative rate to the sled, he will need every calorie he can get.
 

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Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
 
Waitaminute.... wouldn't Santa (and the reindeer) have to also consume energy in order to accelerate their vehicle? I happen to think that Santa feeds most of the milk and cookies to his reindeer while they're making the pit stops. Even considering the vast amounts of energy required, I happen to think that he's not getting ENOUGH calories!

Let's continue this line of thought a little further....

If Santa makes 822 visits per second, that leaves approximately 0.001 seconds to travel between each house (under the generous assumption of zero stopover time at each house). Assuming equal time is devoted both to acceleration and deceleration, that means that Santa's sleigh will accelerate from 0 to 650 miles per second (or 1,046,073 meters per second) in 0.005 seconds. This results in an acceleration of 2,092,147,000 meters per second squared.

Now, at Santa's sleigh's average velocity of 650 miles per second (or 1,046,073 meters per second) and the sleigh's mass (including toys and reindeer) approximate mass of 353,430 US tons (or 320,626,041.12 kilograms), when we multiply the mass times the velocity, we arrive at an approximate kinetic energy of 1.754257e+20 Joules, or 4.18997267422e+19 calories. And that's just for ONE trip between just two houses. Santa's not overfed, he's underfed!

Obviously Santa has some sort of impressive antimatter-fueled reindeer. This seems to indicate some form of genetic engineering to me......

I'd also go into the prospects for time dilation due to the incredible masses and accelerations involved, but that's a bit over my head.
 

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Posted by Ace (Member # 389) on :
 
I love this board.

But seriously, we all know Santa gets the job done by slowing down time.

I mean, just look at the guy. I bet we all hope to look that young at over 1,663 years old.
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
That just furthers my belief taht Santa is a robot.
...and yes, he does run on booze.
 

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Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
 
And blackjack. And hookers.
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
Dont we all though?
 

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Posted by LOA (Member # 49) on :
 
I know *I* do!

~LOA
 

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