WORLD-GENERATION NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016
19
AROUNDTHE WORLD WITH SANTA CLAUS
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 (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 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.
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 reentering 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 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.
So is there really a Santa Claus?
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
PERSPECTIVE
ENGINEERSTAKETHE FUN OUT OF CHRISTMAS
BY R.PALMER
NEXT ISSUE
Class of 2017
February/March 2017
Closing February 28, 2017
BACK ON CAMPUS
WITH SHARON ALLEN,CLASS OF 2007
ONTHE EDGE: WHAT SGIP IS DOINGTO
SUPPORT DER PROLIFERATION
Do you remember the late 1990s, when
Apple was very much an underdog fighting
for its share of the computer-market bone?
IBM’s slogan was “Think,” so Apple ran with
“Think Different.”
Today, twenty years later, the company
that never did manage to elbow windows
computers off the shelf still prevailed by
following its own slogan. Consider this:
Some 40 percent of U.S. smartphone users
are walking around with an iPhone in their
pockets.
I recall this marketing success because
I want utilities to take a cue from Apple:
Think different. If you’re not already doing
so, now would be a good time to start.
Many utility professionals have already
begun to think differently, and I have the
honor of working with some of them in the
Grid Management Working Group hosted
by SGIP. What are they thinking about?
Take a look.
GRID-EDGE MONITORING AND
CONTROL TECHNOLOGY
We must move monitoring and control
technology farther out toward the grid edge.
My discussions with utility professionals tell
me we’re already behind on this evolution.
As examples showing why this is so
important, consider these experiences from
a West Coast utility.
In one case, the utility had grid-scale
solar generating at full output as well as a
400 MW pump storage station that was
pushing water behind the dam. When the
pump station tripped off, voltage jumped and
capacitor banks tripped off. While this didn’t
result in outages, it could have. If a bunch of
capacitor banks go down and voltage goes
too low, lines will trip off due to instability.
In another case, outages did occur. The
utility had an under-frequency scheme in
place, and it had to respond within six cycles
to be effective. All looked well when low
voltage kicked this protective scheme into
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