The Science of Santa
You know, as silly as this list might be, it’s really fascinating that someone did all the math and physics for this. Just this one alone is impressive: 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 on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second – a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour. Check out the full list. It’s bizarre and interesting. If you’re really mean you could crush some poor kid’s dreams with this stuff. But I wouldn’t recommend it.
The Geek Commandments
I absolutely love StumbleUpon. It’s one of the most fascinating browsing tools you can have. The things I find using the random Stumble! button are really awesome, especially since I can choose my preferences (i.e. I can select what sorts of things I Stumble! for).Well, here is something rather funny and worthy of a little commentary:The Geek Commandments (Computer Geeks especially)I agree with almost all of these except for a few, but here is my one-by-one discussion of the options. Goodness, this definitely should be the first one. Always backup your files. Especially important stuff like writing! (Realizes he hasn’t backed up his writing folder in a while…) Duh! Do people still do this? I’d also recommend not making your password your birthday, your child’s birthday, or anything that someone might look up and try to use for your password. It’s good to have passwords that aren’t directly related to yourself, because if you piss off a friend, they’ll know what it is. Well, see, I don’t know if I agree with this one. Yes, on principle this is good advice, but at the same time you have to download the new version, because somebody has to catch the bugs, right? I agree though, avoid it, but don’t tell people to avoid it, like I’m doing now, because you want some idiot like me to download the new version so when you download it down the line it’ll be fixed up. Duh. Same goes for anti-virus (even if you’re on a Mac, because what’s going to happen to your lovely little piece of crap Mac when some loser with Mountain Dew and potato chips coursing through his veins decides to create a super virus that melts your hard drive? Yeah, exactly.) Well, I guess one shouldn’t steal the neighbor’s bandwidth. Honestly, unless the neighbor is really anal and spends his or her day calculating the fluctuations in his/her bandwidth you probably won’t get caught unless you’re doing something that really slows down the net. Agreed. I don’t have an iPod. I have something better, so ha! (Well, I think it’s better.) Duh. I delete such things quick. No. Sorry. I don’t agree. Slacking is bad. I know, I’ve been doing it lately and it’s not helping with the writing. Umm, excuse me? You know what comes to mind when I play Day of Defeat and play the sniper and completely own everyone from a distance? “Mwahahahahahahaha”. That’s right, I do an evil laugh, because it’s funny. Sorry, it’s always the computer’s fault. Never the user. Yup, that’s what I have to say about all that. Cool list though