Christmas cake tips

Is There a Santa Claus?

As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help from
that renowned scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990) - I am pleased
to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.

1 No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species
of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are
insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which
only Santa has ever seen.

2 There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT
since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and
Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378
million according to the Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census)
rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes
there's at least one good child in each.

3 Santa has 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 822.6 visits per second.
This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa
has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the
chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the
tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back
into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these
91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of
course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will
accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of
75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at
least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

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, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a
conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4 The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming
that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2 pounds),
the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably
described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more
than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could
pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even
nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the weight to 353,430 tons.
Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen
Elizabeth.

5 353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as
spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer
will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short,
they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer
behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire
reindeer team will be vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa,
meanwhile, will be subjected to forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity.
A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back
of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion -

If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.
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