Merry Christmas

I'm off to visit the fam... I hope you all have the ability to spend the holidays with the ones who mean the most to you: even if those are friends like Solid Snake or Rikku, or actual family. Merry Christmas to you all, if you made a good haul this year from the fatman, feel free to share.

Comments

huh?

[jhol]

Jake and the Fatman?

What I *didn't* get for Christmas

[Rinikusu]

Off from work, that's for sure.
A working phone line (beware moving the week before christmas)
Internet Connectivity (ditto)
Laid
Over this stupid flu
Letter from Credit Card Companies saying "Hey, that's okay.. don't worry about that $15k you owe us, we'll call it even."

On the other hand, if I can get my ass up in 3 hours, my mom has invited me over for free food! Fuck socks, money, and cheap Walmart bullshit, I want turkey! To hell with Chef Boyardee for a day! woohoo!

Merry xmas to everyone!

Merry Christmas

[AsylumWraith]

New shirt, Adema's new CD, a Best Buy Gift Cert, and a tweed cap I've wanted all year. I can't complain.

AND I got a turkey as a tip last night at work, along with $40 bucks. W00T!

Now if only I didn't have to work tonight... :/

Merry Christmas folks, hope it's a great holiday for everyone.

Re:Merry Christmas

[Anonymous Coward]

lol, a turkey as a tip?

"yeah, that'll be $12 for the pizza and breadsticks."

"Okay, here you go.. oh, and here's a tip for ya -" and he hands him a giant 20 lb. turkey

Re:Merry Christmas

[zzyzx]

For the record, Chanukah is the booby prize of holidays. Never a major holiday, the only people who care about it really are Christians who feel bad about the fact that Jews are left out of it. The big holidays on the calendar are Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and Pesach (Passover in English). If Chanukah fell more frequently in October than December, no one would remember it existed.

I wrote a Hanukka fun guide for a column for jambands.com. It's located at http://www.jambands.com/dec00/columnists/zzyzx.htm l [jambands.com... but you probably knew that]. I'm pasting it here, but the lameness filter didn't like my ASCII art. Go to the orginal if you want to see that.

The Hanukkah Fun Pack

What is Hanukkah?

Hanukkah (also spelled Chanukah, Hanuka, and pretty much any other way you can arrange h's, a's, n's and k's to make that sound) commemorates a military victory over the Greek empire some 2400 years ago. After the Maccabees (aka "The Good Guys") defeated the Greeks (aka "The Bad Guys"), they went to light the everlasting light in the synagogue. Despite having only enough oil to last one day, somehow the light remained lit for the entire 8 days that it took to get some more.

Why Should I Care?

Beats me. Never a major holiday, Hanukkah only really took importance in the 19th century. Frustrated with hearing their kids whining about not getting any Christmas presents, people noticed a holiday located conveniently close to Christmas. Not only was the timing helpful but, unlike most Jewish Holidays, this one didn't even require you to dwell on your failings for 10 days, or do a sundown to sundown fast, or eat all of your meals outside, or not eat bread for 8 days. In fact, this one could even be described as fun. Rabbis poured over the Talmud, figuring that having a fun holiday must be against Jewish law somehow. They were pursuing an investigation over a digression inspired by some 15th century debate over whether killing a snake that wandered into your tent on the Sabbath counted as "work," when someone reminded them of Purim. While Hanukkah is enjoyable, it doesn't hold a candle (that's a little holiday humor there, laugh ok?) to Purim - what with the story involving oral sex and rampaging hordes of angry Jews, the encouragements to go out and get drunk, and kids given noisemakers and told to be really loud and annoying.

Wait a second! You said "fun." Is there any actual enjoyment here?

Well kind of. The celebration of Hanukkah revolves around three things - fire, grease, and gambling.

Fire: The most ritualistic aspect of the holiday involves lighting a menorah for 8 days. No menorah was included in this Fun Pack because:

(1) They tend to be expensive.
(2) If you knocked over the Menorah and burned down Concur, everyone would end up blaming me most likely.
(3) There's an annoyingly complicated special way that you have to light the candles.

Despite their absence here, Menorahs do provide many happy memories. For example, there was the time when my parents left the house, leaving me in charge of the menorah lighting. I then decided to show some basic candle tricks to my brother (including the "flaming ball of wax" trick). Ok, when they got home, I did have some questions to answer - such as, "Why is there wax all over this table?" - but any excuse to play with candles is a good thing.

Grease: Since one of the major parts of the Hanukkah story involves oil burning longer than it should, an aspect of celebration involves eating food fried in oil (traditionally potato pancakes, but I like to push this rule). How often can you say, "I'm eating these Jo-Jos for religious reasons." Eight days of Onion Rings and Mozerella Sticks. That's my idea of a holiday.

Gambling: This is the biggie. You may have noticed many tops inside this package. These are known as dreidels. Each side has a Hebrew letter on it. The letters are the first letter of each word in the phrase "A Great Miracle Happened Here." While some people question whether misestimating the amount of oil you have really qualifies as "great miracle" - it clearly doesn't match up well with - say - the birth of a savior - the phrase does sound better than "A New Measuring Device Was Needed Here."

The way the dreidel works is simple. You start out with a pot of M&Ms or Gelt or something in the middle. You spin the dreidel and see what side comes up.

If gimmel comes up, that means Get... you get the entire contents of the pot.

If hey comes up, that means Half... you get half of what is in there.

If nun comes up, that means Nothing... nothing happens.

If shin comes up, that means Shit, I have to put one back.

I thought about being a dreidel hustler who would wait until the pot got really big and then say, "No, you must have misheard me. THIS one is gimmel," when I spun. Instead though, here is a little ascii hebrew letter guide:

[Guide removed to satisfy lameness filter]

Look for the tail there for gimmel

Now you can tell this game is made for kids, because it's all about getting lots of M&M's and rarely about giving them back. The question becomes, what do you do with your dreidels when you're sick of candy. One thing is to do stupid dreidel tricks. My favorite is the spin the dreidel on its head trick, but the bounce and then spin trick is also cool... when I can get it to work.

Other games (such as high stakes dreidel gambling and strip dreidel) are to be played at your own risk. Know your limits. If you find yourself dreidelling uncontrollably, please call the Washington State Council on Problem Gambling Hotline number at 1-800-547-6133.

What if I think this whole Hanukkah thing is kind of lame?

See that koosh ball in there? Play with it.

December 25th

[perlchimp]

Christmas Eve dinner out: $250
12 beers: $50

Posting to /. at 5am on Christmas: worthless

My girlfriend...

[paul-s]

My girlfriend left me alone for Christmas.
She went to the bahamas! Is this a sign?

The Physics of Santa Claus

[Raul Acevedo]

From an old Santa scientific inquiry...

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 the 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, and 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 his sleigh, jump down the chimnye, 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 purpose of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking aabout .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75.5 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, 3000 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 punds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (refer to point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal load, 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 - 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 spacecrafts re-entereing the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy per SECOND, EACH! In short, hey will burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create a deafening sonic boom in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousanths 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 by now.

Re:The Physics of Santa Claus (Santa's Rebuttal )

[EABinGA]

Santa's Rebuttal
NORTH POLE, SANTA'S VILLAGE - For Immediate Release

It has come to the attention of Santa's workshop that there have been disparaging remarks made in the press recently about Santa's very existence. Several key points are overlooked by this callous, amateurish, so-called study.

As was admitted by the skeptics, there is only a very small probability of finding a flying reindeer. That is precisely because they are all located at the Workshop. Your very argument against Santa is proof of his existence! As is widely known (Re: the excellent historical documentaries "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer") the flying reindeer are not a separate species, but were in fact given the power of flight due to eating magic acorns, which is passed on in their offspring.

A series of cascading assumptions have been relied upon to show the "impossibility" of delivering all presents in one Christmas. For example, there was assumed a uniform distribution of children across homes. Toronto/Yorkville, or NYC/SOHO, or other yuppie neighborhoods, have less than the average (and don't forget the DINK/SINK homes (Double Income No Kids, Single Income No Kids)), while the Catholic (the predominant Christian denomination) families with 10 children would skew that derived 15% of homes down a few percent.

You've also assumed that each home that has kids would have at least one good kid. Let us assure you that anti-selection applies, and homes with good kids tend to have more than their share of good kids? Still other single-child homes are notorious for spoiled "naughty" children and average 55% delivery on a good year. Let's drop that number of homes down a few more percent.

A simple history lesson reminds us that, the first major schism in the Church split the Eastern Churches, centered in Byzantium, from the Western, which remained centered in Rome, prior to the Gregorian correction to the Julian calendar. The Eastern "Orthodox" Churches do not recognize the Gregorian correction for liturgical events, and their Christmas is, as a result, several days after that of the Western Churches'. Thus, Santa's schedule is not as tight as previously indicated.

Santa does indeed FedEx a number of packages ahead of time, since he is not be able to fly into Air Force Bases, or into tower- controlled areas near airports. He's certainly not into dodging SCUD missiles over the no-fly zones in Iraq, so he uses DHL there. Subtract some more homes.

In regards to speed and time, we can't reveal all the details, but let us remind you of basic relativity theory: The faster you go, the slower time progresses. Do you think StarTrek came up with the idea of warp drive? So, if Santa could go faster than light, then he can easily visit all the good children which are not uniformly distributed by either concentration in each home or by number of children per household, and get home before he left so he can digest all those stale cookies and warm milk. (Has anyone thought of ice cubes?)

Aha, you say, Enterprise has matter-antimatter warp engines, Santa only has reindeer, where does he get the power to move that fast? The answer is right before your skeptical eyes! The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy. Per second. Each. This is an ample supply of energy for the maneuvering, acceleration, etc., that would be required of the loaded sleigh. The reindeer don't evaporate or incinerate or get crushed because of this energy; they accelerate! What do you think they have antlers for, fighting over females? Think of antlers as furry shield generator arrays.

The issue of weight constraints and delivery methods also shows a shocking lack of knowledge of basic matter/energy relations and beginning quantum physics. (Picture a two dimensional complex function mapped to the surface of a sphere with approximately 9000 nodal surfaces, and 18 million regions of relatively high amplitude.) Assuming this is getting way ahead of most people's conceptual limits, we'll just say that Captain Kirk wasn't the first to say "beam me down." Transporters, replicators, and holo-projections have been standard equipment in some workshops and certain aerospace vehicle way before the 24th century.

If that's not enough, watch the news on the 24th at 11 o'clock. NORAD (one of the few government agencies with more than 3 initials in it's name and therefore more trustworthy than the rest) tracks Santa every year and displays radar shots of him approaching from the North Pole. They haven't bombarded him yet, so they must believe too, right?

We certainly hope this clears up any damage caused by the bad press. Santa dead, indeed--some people will twist any statistic model to "prove" their cynical theory.

Best Wishes for the Holidays

[KILNA]

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all; and a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2002, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures, and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform, or sexual preference of the wishes.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others, and is void where prohibited by law, and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.