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Annual NORAD Santa Tracker Up And Running
SumDeusExMachina writes: "NORAD is at it once again folks! You can track Santa as he travels across the globe via a nifty Real Media stream." Apparently, this guy has been making some changes up North, too, including stealth technology, so I hope the radar tracks.
My 4 year old daughter was spun up due to all the Christmas excitement. We were having trouble getting her to sleep until we showed her where santa was on the map - he's getting close! So off to bed she went without a peep.
How would tracking by radar be possible?
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
A few years ago, when I powered up one of the lost Clinton administration laptops (it was found in under a set on the DC Metro), I came across some interesting intelligience data. Apparently, the White Bearded One (WBO) has advanced well beyond what this article implies. I only caught a quick glimpse before the Secret Service snatched it from my hands and threatened to lock me up (didn't say where exactly).
Naturally, I pretended not to have seen anything...except to say I was looking for a video game to play and it was just sitting there looking like it wanted to be played.
Well, anyway...it seems that the WBO has been dabbling with quantum physics. Supposedly, he's found a way to convert himself into a wave function. This allows him to visit every home in the world simultaneously. But, it seems to work better if he contrained the function to a particular longitude. By adjusting this variable alone, he could make his visit to each child's home at exactly midnight in the child's time zone.
Pretty ingenious if you ask me. He doesn't even need to slip down any more chimmneys and risk getting stuck (or burned). And, because the probabliity of him being where you are looking is so remote, he remains completely stealthy yet accomplishes his yearly mission in exactly one solar day. Whoa.
Happy Holidays to All!
RD
Santa is not a Christian tradition, per se. Indeed he is quite secular.
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
Isn't it ironic that this story of Santa being tracked as he goes about his business should appear right next to the "World Sousveillance Day" article....
I have to ask? How many massive bong hits did you have before comming up with this site? Its great!
and got the following reply.
John,
Santa's sled is powered by reindeer not 'bong hits' (whatever that is). Our technology is supplied by the incredibly complex NORAD tracking system, the website by STK and AOL.
Keep checking out the website throughout the day
Go 'Noles.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Years
Team NORAD
They took the time to figure out I was from FSU area from my ip I guess. Very impresed
From CNN:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. military officials are tracking Santa's travel path and reporting the latest data on his location on a Web site.
"If he deviates from his filed flight plan or turns off his transponder, we're prepared to scramble F-15s from Langley AFB, Eglin AFB, Mountain Home AFB, Elmendorf AFB, Tyndall AFB, and Nellis AFB, and blow that fat bastard out of the skies," said NORAD spokesman Gen. Buck Turgidson.
In addition, Gen. Turgidson stated that there would be a limited test of National Missile Defense (NMD) tracking assets at various locations around the country. "Santa can deploy all the decoys he wants. We'll find him, we'll track him, we'll get him," Gen. Turgidson added.
Military analysts have mentioned possible countermeasures Santa Claus might take to avoid NORAD radar, including a low-altitude, terrain-masking flight profile, radar-absorbant coating on his sleigh, and multiple layers of metal foil on Rudolph's nose to lessen the infrared signature.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Well, if it was me choosing an OS to organize a bunch of reindeer, I would have to trust to instinct and run with the Hurd.
:-)
(Groan: -1 Corny
I thought /. was a REAL news source! How unprofessional! They didn't bother to do any fact checking on this story... I found out through a friend that Santa doesn't actually exist.
Shame on you.
SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective
.001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 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.
I. 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 house hold, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.
II. Santa has about 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 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 stockings, 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 to 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.
III. 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).
IV. 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second crates 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 650 m.p.s. in
V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
Quid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Anything said in Latin, sounds profound.
"I don't trust goats," --To Catch a Spy
Er, wrong. Santa Claus is an Americanization of Sinterklaas, the Dutch name for Saint Nicholas. Saint Nicholas was one of the early Christians (he participated in the first Council of Nicaea), and went on to become one of the most famous and well regarded saints in all of Europe. His reputation for generosity and kindness gave rise to legends of miracles he performed for the poor and unhappy.
Although the trappings associated with the modern Santa Claus legend date to the late 1800's and the American poem "Twas The Night Before Christmas" (flying reindeer, sleigh, chimney sliding and the red coat were all original creations of that poem), the concept is completely Christian in origin and far older, dating back almost to the time of Christ.
Now, one could argue that Christmas *itself* isn't a Christian tradition, per se, since the early Christians simply co-opted the Roman holiday Saturnalia, a holiday far more like our modern Christmas than Christmas itself was up until about a hundred years ago, and one which involved festivals, a state holiday, a feast, lights and the exchange of gifts. Everything old . . .
The NORAD Santa Report owes its existence to a typo in a local newspaper in Omaha,
Nebraska. In the mid-Fifties, a local department store had an actor impersonating Santa Claus,
that kids could call on Christmas Eve. (Presumably, the guy told the kids that "he'd be right over" and tell them to get to bed early.)
Unfortunately, the number had one digit wrong, which yuppers, patched the rugrats into NORAD.
The somewhat amused personnel, married and with kids themselves (as per regulation,
according to then-current psychological theory) took to saying "Well, we're an Air Force base, not
Santa Claus, but yes, we're tracking Santa right now."
A few winters of this were enough to get everyone's story straight, and to retire the number (except for Santa reports). In 1958, they began releasing live reports to TV and radio stations, casting high-ranking (and often retired) officers asuld get a "full NORAD welcome" (of escorting state-of-the-art fighter jets) if seen over US airspace. Creepy, when you think of it...
teleny, friend of cats.
You forgot to mention that our modern "image" of Santa Claus was created in (I think) the 1920's by an artist working on a Coca Cola advertising campaign.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!