"Is There A Santa Claus?"

As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research
help from that renown 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 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 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.

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 payload - not even
counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for
comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5) 353,000 tons traveling 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 vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.

Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal 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.