SANTA CLAUSE: AN ENGINEER’S PERSPECTIVE
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) faiths, 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, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one 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 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.
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).
600,000 tons traveling 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 vaporised 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 per second in 0.001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration 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.
Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now.
Merry Christmas!
t
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Good Night Dad…
Well, Dad was there, I was there, Helen and all of our kids were there. Cousins that I rarely see were there, Aunts, Uncles and old old friends were there. (Thanks for dropping by Connie Mac, Dad would have been thrilled)
Old friends of mine were there as well, Dan Parker, old Army buddy, His ex-wife, Laura, a dear friend of ours, was there and Daniel Fincher at her side. Finchers and Smelsers have been getting in and out of trouble together for longer than I care to remember, Daniel’s older brother was in my 1st grade class, many, many moons ago. We grew up together.
Ben Foiles and wife Amanda were there, new friends in comparison to some, but every bit as dear. Ben leaves for Africa next month, in the service of his county, pray for him and his family, for a safe return to his friends and loved ones. There were a lot of folks there, some that Dad watched grow up. We thank you all.
Uncle Sam showed up as well, sending a fine honor squad to help send Dad on his way. As there were several members, both present and past of the US Armed Forces in attendance, I can say that we were suitably impressed and grateful for their participation in the final ceremonies for Dad. This was as Dad wanted it and I’m sure he is happy with the results.
Taps
Day is done, gone the sun
From the lakes, from the hills, from the sky
All is well, safely rest
God is nigh.
Fading light dims the sight
And a star gems the sky, gleaming bright
From afar, drawing near
Falls the night.
Thanks and praise for our days
Neath the sun, neath the stars, neath the sky
As we go, this we know, God is nigh.
These are words that are attributed to and used in a recording made by John Wayne about the song,
Fading light
Falling night
Trumpet call, as the sun, sinks in fright
Sleep in peace, comrades dear,
God is near.
Dad knew of these words and I think would have been glad that I included them here.
And of course, Old Glory was there. It was important
to dad that she show up and she was there in all her finest. She brought friends as well.
We never even got a chance to thank them…
So thanks, you made a family very happy.
On behalf of the President of the United States
and the people of a grateful nation, may I present
this flag as a token of appreciation for the
honorable and faithful service your loved one
rendered this nation.
Thank you my friends, for your support during this time of amazing stress for us all, only your love got us through.
Terry Smelser and Family.
Gallery Images added 30 Sept 11 at or about, 08:00 Funeral Images
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Topics: Family | 1 Comment »
To the end.
Helen took this image last time I was home, at the same time she took the pictures of me feeding Dad. Its one of the better pictures we have of him in the last few years.
Friday, September 16th, 2011 M.L. Smelser, my Dad, passed from this world to join my mom, Jonnie Lavon (Hollan) Smelser in the afterlife that they have both clung to for their entire lives. He lived with dignity and determination and he crossed over the same way.
He had been ill for a very long time, for the better part of 10 years now. About 5 years ago, his ability to walk became extremely impaired and it became harder and harder for my mom to help him (she herself had been fighting breast cancer for many years until it took her from us only a couple of months ago.) We were ask if we would take the addition on the house as an apartment and help out.
Helen had to get off the truck and has been working actively as their care-givers for the better part of 3 years as both grew weaker and weaker. Dad was holding Mom’s hand as she passed from this world and told her as she departed “I’m right behind you sweety”.
We’ve all seen this, old married couples depart within months or even days of one another, we knew this would be only a matter of time. In the last week dad stopped talking, stopped eating or drinking, just stopped.
We had some bad times growing up, an injury took him out of work for years at one point. He held things together with the kind of shear determination that can only be learned growing up during the great depression of the 1930s. He never lost his sense of humor, never lost his faith and never lost his love.
I… WE… will miss him terribly, he was many things to all of us and through all the adversity, all the strain, he was a husband, a grand father, a patriot, but mostly he was Dad.
To the End
t
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Angry? You don’t know the half…
This is a rant, it’s probably not going to make sense.
I was in bed… Hey.. I worked nights and was about 3 hours into my usual 4 hour nap when my wife woke me. One look at her face, normally bright and cheerful, and I reached for the .45 on the head board.
“No” she said very quietly, “Its on the TV, you need to come see.”
The image you see to the left is almost exactly the moment I sat on the living room sofa.
My. Heart. Stopped. Beating.
I’m a trained soldier, a warrior, we get old and fat, but it never ever leaves us. Operations and Intel is (was) part of what I did, my mind went into threat assessment mode. I quickly gathered all the information in the room, but my wife had just turned the TV on, we didn’t know anything yet. “Maybe it just a horrible accident”? she ask but I had already seen the second plane inbound. I pointed to it.
“NO… it’s an attack”
In only a few more moments, we had more of the story, the Pentagon, Flight 93… Our nation had been attacked.
Angry? yeah…
For one of the few times in my life, I was frightened out of my wits, (I’m not real bright about things like that) then I grew ANGRY.
We kept the kids home from school that day and maybe the next, I don’t remember, but they were kept home because, more than anything, we did not want this thing being explained to them by TEACHERS.
We saw hours and hours of horror, we watched the people make the decision to die in a fall, rather than a fire. We got a grasp of what had happened to flight 93 over that farm in PA, we saw the damages done to the Pentagon. And we as a family, became ANGRY.
In only a matter of days, talking heads and even worse, headshrinkers (People that receive money to fuck with the emotions of others under the guise of “helping” them) were telling us and insisting that the films of the attack should not be shown anymore, because they made people “ANGRY”
No Shit? And exactly whats wrong with being ANGRY?
Ten years later, almost to the hour, I am boiling, seething, ANGRY. I make no apology for it either, it’s my RIGHT.
“Uncontained anger could cost the lives of innocents…”
REALLY? like it already hasn’t? And where exactly would we find these “innocents”?
The Arab world erupted into mass celebration over the mass murders of American citizens, they partied in the streets, men women and children, I saw the FILMS of it. Those films were quashed even quicker than the films of the attack.
ANGRY?
(Today, “some” of the films from 9 Sept 2001 were shown on TV… SOME of them. Will they show the Arab “party in the street films”? I doubt it)
Mr Bush gathered his information and made his decisions based on that information. I suppose that was the right thing to do… but I am totally unsatisfied with the results ten years later.
For a time, we tore the life from those that had attacked us and those that had supported them. Now, we are falling asleep again and the job is NOT DONE.
We have wasted to much time and to many lives… AMERICAN lives, fighting a “politically correct” war against these animals.
Our troops are still fighting and dieing in Afghanistan, a place we attacked because they refused to arrest and turn over to us the people that attacked us. When we attacked, those people simply moved to Pakistan, where Osama Bin Laden lived in comfort for years, as a guest of that government, while they pretend to help us find him. It took almost ten years to get the guy that masterminded the attack in 2001 and in my opinion, it was only done to try to boost the rapidly falling popularity of a failed president. We knew he was there.
We have an administration that has shown sympathy and extended aid to the very enemy we fight.
Hmm… Aid and comfort to an enemy in a time of war… there is a word for that…
The proper course? Take down the infrastructure, cripple or destroy all transportation and services, (gas, water, electric, roads, bridges, etc) kill as much of the military and it’s commanders as we can find, same for political leadership, down to town mayors, destroy dams and flood farm land, render the country inert and destitute, unable to defend or feed it’s self and be home by Christmas.
I’m only saying… had it been my call, sometime in 2002, the biggest problem “WE”, as Americans, would have had in the middle east would have been deciding where to build the next WalMart.
“Radical Islam” exists because “Moderate Islam” allows it and supports it.
There are no innocents.
ANGRY?
Hell yes I’m still angry.
Topics: The Nation | No Comments »
Site News, Still under construction.
So there I sat working on a new site… (this one) and I glanced up at the coffee table I had my feet on at the stuff building up… The hand gun was digging a hole in my hip, had to go, the 2 knives were digging holes in the various places they were hidden along with a 3rd that was still in my right pocket, the bottle of fine American bourbon just looked kind of lonely over there on my desk so I brought it over to help with the site build. The mouse… the DAMN MOUSE, was back over there where I couldn’t get to it… again… I hate touch pads in laptops. The cell phone was annoying me, but then, cell phones always annoy me…
I dug that picture out of my camera, just looking for stuff to post while I try to get this site the way I want it. It’s going to be slow because of the conditions I work under most of the time. At the moment of this writing I’m sitting on the bunk of my truck, waiting for the meat house to pull their heads out of their asses and get my load though the USDA inspection that should have been done yester-damn-day. They put a drop dead time on this load of 06:45 this morning… then delayed it 12 hours waiting for a civil servant. They weren’t happy when I informed them of the detention time they were going to pay. (schedule better next time Jose…)
I don’t “really” have internet here, the terminal manager looked at me like I had lost my mind when I ask what had happened to the driver’s WIFI hot spot, said there never was one… I know better. So I’m tethered to my phone… eh… it works, just slowly.
Personally I’m not real happy with a lot of this site, I like the theme, sort of, but I’m not sure I like that Java crap in the header. The dragon skin background is cool but I think I can do better. The layout could be better and as fond of the guy as I am, I don’t really like the name all that much. So a lot of changes to be made, I’m thinking I may end up keeping the basic idea of the theme and ripping every single bit of it out and replacing it with my own images, etc…
OH! about comments, I love comments for the most part, “BUT”, I moderate comments for a reason. When the public execution of spammers is not only law but national sport, I’ll stop moderating comments. The last post, the one about my dad, pulled four comments, one from my daughter, two spam and one from a guy that I think was commenting on the wrong site. The site has been up 2 or 3 days and people are trying to sell me SEO shit I don’t need and VIAGRA… I don’t need frigging VIAGRA… assholes. I don’t moderate for any other reason… well OK, I take that back. There ARE people that I just don’t care to hear from, for any reason. They just don’t have anything to say that adults would want to hear. The ones that address me in public get ignored, I just walk away. There is no reason to let them post crap on my site. (Like “come on Terry, we need to talk about this, call me…”, I’ve spammed that guy repeatedly) So if you comment, it will take a bit, maybe even a day or two before they show up. If you are a spammer, wordpress collects IP addresses, I give those addresses to some old hacker friends of mine. (don’t be surprised when pictures of you screwing that goat last Christmas, the ones in the folder marked “hot chicks”, show up on the web…)
So, keep an eye open as I totally ruin this theme and start over with others… and try to figure out a new name for the site…
t
Topics: Site News | 2 Comments »
The hardest things…
I’ve done a lot of things in my life that were “hard”.
Most of my education, the advanced stuff anyway, are self taught. My higher math skills, that I no longer need, came about in the Army, when I taught myself ballistic trig, in order to do my job better.
About 25 years ago, I walked away from a very expensive “habit”, no doctors, no rehab or any of the fancy crap that others use or need to beat that one. Just family and the determination, “Never Again”.
I spend weeks, even months away from the people that I really care about, to provide for them and myself.
My wife has been taking care of my parents for about the last 3 years, working as nurse and maid for them both. It hasn’t been easy for her and it hasn’t been easy for me to be away while the slow degeneration of their health progressed. About 2 months ago, I drove off from my parents home that we have been sharing with them. (To keep us close in order to render any aid we can.) I drove off knowing it would be the last time I would see my mom alive. I got the call from my wife, 3 days later, the cancer had finally won. Mom did one of the bravest things I have ever seen a few months before, when she refused treatment. The treatment she said, was worse than the cancer.
In the picture above you see me feeding my dad. He can no longer manage the fork or spoon on his own. Handing him an open glass of milk means wiping it up. Dad is miserable because of this and sitting there seeing it in his eyes is one of the hardest things I’ve had to do this last trip home.
There is something that is going to be harder, in the morning, I have to get back in that 18 wheeler and leave. I have to leave knowing that this is probably the last time I’ll see dad alive.
Then, comes the family feuding over whats left of their lives. My sister and her “other” family already think I’m a stiff necked, unbending, unforgiving “strait”.
It’s going to be loud, as I execute the will, just exactly as it is written.
t
Topics: Family | 2 Comments »
So it begins…
So… here we g
o.
New web site, new email, new purpose in my blogging.
My old political rants will be where they have been for a long time now.
“IF” I decide to talk about trucking it could be here, might be there.
Same goes for my major past time; shooting sports and firearms.
Nothing is written in stone here for the moment, from the theme to the intended content of this blog.
Keep coming back to see.
t
Topics: Site News | 2 Comments »
