A Modest Construct

Hey, PZ Meyers did it. Type each letter of the alphabet into your address bar and write the first address that appears for each. First is my work machine (mostly web design and news); home machine will come later.

Seriocomic links an interesting point about digital media saturation:

I’m finding that the “digital photo effect” is starting to make its way into my music and video experiences as well. What’s the DPE? My ability to produce and acquire has far outstripped my ability to consume. Produce from my own digital camera. Acquire from friends, family, Flickr, etc. This has a couple of ramifications:

1. I feel behind all the time.
2. Because there is so much to consume, I don’t enjoy each individual photo as much as I did when they were physical prints. I click through fast.
3. Because of 1 and 2, sometimes I don’t even bother.

rootburn: Too much of a good thing?

I must confess that I have felt this same phenomenon, shortly after the Conquering Worm of P2P arrived on the scene. I’m not sure it’s fair to place the blame entirely on the sudden imbalance of acquisition and appreciation. Perhaps the most pointed of examples I can bring up is that of Nine Inch’s Nails’ The Fragile, which I first heard in 1999, before I became involved in Napster. Put bluntly, years later, I would wonder why I rarely seemed to recreate the intense fascination and joy that The Fragile inspired in me. I had a folder full of 30 second sound clips from Amazon.com and listened to them on repeat until such time as I could get to Best Buy and purchase the album. I attribute my perceived lack of enthusiasm to several things:

1. The Fragile represented an entirely new type of music for me, prior to which I had subsisted entirely on radio rock and pop. The more I explored, the less new types there were to discover. I think this, perhaps, is even more perfidious that the amount available, that it takes so much more to impress a man who’s been around the block, so to speak. I do recall that Opeth’s My Arms, Your Hearse evoked a similar reaction.
2. Let’s face it: the new millennium, while it has seen its share of excellent bands, has not been kind to the music scene in general. The corporate hegemony of the music business has a tendency (ok, knee-jerk reaction) to squash inventive or challenging music and promote the banal, simple, and marketable. There have simply been some periods of time where the music scene was listless. Is my lack of enjoyment in Opeth’s latest release due to the fact that I downloaded it early, or because it really was a lackluster album?

It’s true that my ability to acquire music has outstripped my ability to listen to it, but that doesn’t mean I can’t focus on the albums I really look forward to just as much as I used to. That is, in fact, one of the big points that RIAA opponents like to bring up: the albums that people really want, that really have merit, they will buy just as they always did.

No holiday season would be complete without a few scrooges humbugging about. Way back in seventh grade, my eccentric science teacher, Mike Priesbe, read us The Physics of Santa Claus, which came to the blunt conclusion “He’s dead now.” Here it is, in all of its glory, along with some creative, if unconvincing, rebuttals.

1) Flying Reindeer
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) Children
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 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 that there is at least one good child in each.

3) Timing
Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he logically travels east to west. This works out to 822.6 visits per second, so 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, we know to be false, but for 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 assorted pit stops for relief, feeding, etc. This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. In 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) Weight
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 could pull ten 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).

5) Speed
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 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 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 Gs. 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.

Conclusion…
If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.

The Physics of Santa Claus