I have to send a huge thank you to someone who more than likely doesn't read our blog. My coworker Emily is mostly responsible for my discovery earlier this week that I had two sick/personal days left to take before the end of the year.
Remember back in April when I got all sicked up and ended up taking somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 consecutive work-days off — to spend the entire day sleeping on the couch with the shades closed and a washcloth draped over my face due to (unbeknownst to me at the time) Iritis? I'm sure you do.
As it turns out, I thought I had taken all of my sick/personal days before eating into my vacation time — but I hadn't. I found out on Wednesday morning that if I don't take my two remaining personal days that I'll be paid for them at the end of the year. And considering that I haven't had a day off since I went back to work with one good eye, I've decided to use them.
I took today off, and I'm taking Tuesday the 26th off as my final vacation day (again — I thought I was out of vacation time but luck was on my side and a day I was given for 2005 had rolled over unused and forgotten). So I have a five-day weekend! And I get presents! Life doesn't get any better than this!
Actually, it does. After my extended weekend, I'll be going back to work for two days. And then I'm taking that Friday —the 29th— off; which makes it a four-day weekend when you include the New Year's holiday.
I saw this on a blog that I read and couldn't pass on posting it here for you to enjoy. I don't know if the term cynicism applies when subjecting something known to be false to scientific proof – but as someone who (at the risk of "tooting my own horn") is good at as well as interested in math and science, it's as interesting as it is amusing.
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, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming 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 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 onto 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 thousands 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).
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 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 much, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 mps in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 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.
I feel like this is a lame post, because this is the only picture I've got:
I just haven't taken any other interesting pictures this week, between a lack of time and interesting subject matter.
I've decided to give Flickr a shot. I know I've been pimping Picasa recently, but that was mainly fueled by my love for the windows client. Sadly, there's no google-made equivalent for Macs. They have an iPhoto exporter plugin, but that's about it. Until recently I've always managed my picture archives manually like so:
/pictures/2005/0101 – New Years Eve
While I do like some features of iPhoto on my new Macbook, I'm not thrilled with the way it organizes the pictures on my hard drive and I think I'm just going to stop using it and go back to manually managing them. Since my main draw to Picasa is gone, and Flickr has this neat feature where you can put notes right on your photos (something I've long wanted my other photo sharing solutions to imitate), I figured it was worth a shot. It also seems to be the de-facto photo sharing site among bloggers, and I can see why.
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