The Good: Giants Superbowl victory, The Dark Knight, New music (Metallica & AC/DC), Firefox 3, I’m still alive and doing okay since it could always be worse. Otherwise, I got nothing else for ya.

The bad: Stock indexes posted the worst yearly losses since 1931, a failing economy, George Carlin died, The Yankees sucked and missed the playoffs for the first time since 1994, a reporter dude had bad aim and missed Bush’s head with a shoe and other personal failures of my own which I will not mention here (because I’m not really open in general, but I especially won’t post it online). But that can be easily solved in a new year, so it’s insignificant.

So in the words of me “2008 can go take a crap” (Jon gets a kick out of that). Here’s to 2009! Fresh start and time to do some exiting new things, for the better. Sidenote: things won’t instantaneously get better – it’s not like a magic switch was thrown and the shit veil lifted, but hopefully things can start rolling and I won’t actually complain at this time next year.

Yay!

You don’t hear Jews calling a Menorah a holiday lamp, do you? No, they don’t generalize Hanukkah.

I believe that saying happy holidays is fine, because it is a lazy way to generalize every person’s belief without studying what they are celebrating. However, this still does not justify replacing the word Christmas with holiday.

The fact that Christmas songs are banned in public schools is complete bull. If the choir at my high school could sing Hanukkah songs in Hebrew, why are we not allowed to hear Christmas songs? Everything should be equal.

So use the right name for things and stop generalizing everything that occurs in December to holiday.

Anyway this is the first time this site’s working in 2005. Half of the datacenter was out (over 40 servers) Since the servers are located in Orlando, I think the admins were all drunk and celebrating the New Year with Mickey Mouse in Disneyworld. Oh well, its up now.

ENGINEERS TAKE THE FUN OUT OF CHRISTMAS

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 (except maybe in Japan) 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 household, which comes to 108 million homes, presuming there is at least 1 good child in each. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming 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 stocking, 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 or 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.

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 can pull 10 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). A mass of nearly 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 adsorb 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 miles/second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g’s. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim considering all the high calorie snacks he must have consumed over the years) 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.