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The Physics of Santa
Roland Piquepaille writes "If you don't believe that Santa Claus can deliver presents to millions of homes in a single night, Larry Silverberg, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University (NCSU), explains that Santa's society of elves has an understanding of physics and engineering that exceeds our own. In fact, Santa Claus and his crew really can deliver presents in one night because of their advanced knowledge of electromagnetic waves, the space/time continuum, nanotechnology, genetic engineering and computer science. For example, he doesn't carry presents. He uses a nano-toymaker to fabricate toys grown atom by atom inside the children's homes. Very entertaining reading... Here is a link to additional details and pictures of Santa and his elves flying over New Zealand."
Ive got a bridge and a Messiah to sell you.
Then why am I not floating in a huge B-Field right now?
I feel the karma roasting ...right....now....
>Science of Santa Claus: Jolly Old Elf Really Can Deliver Presents in One Night, Says NC >State Engineer
Your American tax dollars at work, everyone.
Please can someone work out how to deliver presents to Mars colonists in a night. It would be extremely helpful in the near future.
Santa
Roland the Plogger even tries to cash in on Xmas. How tacky.
Todd Neff from the Boulder Camera wrote a Christmas Eve article about the physics of Santa. He included a "Parental disretion advised" notice, but the headline writer argueably got a little carried away. Needless to say, since I live in the Republic of Boulder, outraged residents wrote several letters to the editor that were published on December 28th. So I wrote the following which ran on December 31st. Great headline by the Camera and they printed my letter in its entirety (including some subtle attempts at humor) with minor grammatical edits.
HO, HO, HO - Yes, Virginia, as my Web cam shows
As a technologist, I enjoyed Todd Neff's piece on Christmas Eve about the physics of Santa; kudos to the Daily Camera for not just reprinting the AP article, but doing some local embelishment that added a nice touch to the story (and ditto in the Dec. 28 piece about the coming leap-second).
As reported by the Camera's Kate Larsen a week earlier (Dec. 17), I have three Web cams (three more than last year) at my house watching my 26,000 Christmas lights. Needless to say, my 7-year-old and 4-year-old sons were excited to see if Santa would show up on these Web cams. And, not surprisingly, the Big Red Guy (and especially Rudolph) are quite visible stopping by our Lafayette house on Christmas Eve.
So while it would be (way!) out of place for me to weigh in on journalistic reporting as other letter writers have, I thought I would write to say that while Todd accurately reported that the physics of Santa are a challenge, the conclusion is wrong. Yes, sometimes, the paper doesn't get the story right ... and yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
Santa does deliver presents on Christmas Eve to children around the world.
The magic/miracle is still alive, and I would suggest that Camera readers (and their kids) review the video at www.komar.org to judge for themselves.
And you'd better believe I'll be watching next year as Santa returns at Christmas.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
If anyone needs further evidence that Slashdot is not for adults, this should put the nail in that coffin.
hey, hate to break it to ya - but Santa does not exist (and if he does exist he should be prosecuted for molesting little girls and boys - why do parents let their kids sit on grown weird fake beared people?)
Locksmith
Santa Claus: An Engineer's Perspective I. There are approximately 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Jehovah's Witnesses, or Buddist religions, this reduces the workload on 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.
II. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and 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 at least one good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, jump out, go 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 in the sleigh, and move on to the next house. (That's why it's really pointless to stay up and wait for him....)
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 breaks. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3000 times the speed of sound. For the purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 75.4 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 has 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 nothing more than 300 pounds. Even granted that "flying" reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or nine of them; Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the sleigh itself, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizibeth (the ship, not the monarch).
IV. 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance; this would heat up the reindeer in the same fasion 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 causing deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.2 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reaches the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 miles per second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 G's. A 250 pound Santa (which seem ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pound of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
Don't forget to click my link and read some of the responses to the original post, they're great. Merry Christmas Slashdot!
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
This guy really couldn't let go his childhood beliefs.
sw5YRhw4ln3pr7$Ock1/4ma0u8Lw2Tm5l6/7DOiC5e6t4NSb6
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 cihldren, that reduces the workload to 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 seemes 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 travelling at 650 miles per second creates enourmous
air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as
spacecrafts 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.
Has anyone notified the President about this ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Live egh ?
http://www.komar.org/christmas/hoax/media.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6761704/
perhaps it would be best if WE DIDN'T BELIEVE A SINGLE WORD YOU SAY
and get our Santa Tracker from someone a bit more reputable
http://www.noradsanta.org/
All your Elve are belong to us?
Just take a look at the Norad Santa scanner. Now we'd better hope he won't be identified as a terrist and shot down when he makes is way into the US :-)
... won't somebody think of the children!
Santa could easily solve the world's oil and energy problems.
But, no; the world's spoiled brats complained when he gave them coal instead of the usual useless trinkets back in the day.
And now those same little bastards are all grown up, and killing people who don't give them enough oil.
Bah! Humbug!
From http://home.tiac.net/~cri/2002/santaring.html
... "He sees you when you're sleeping... he knows when you're awake... he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake!"
...
(Don't bother hitting the link, here's the text from the page - the author who collected and organized the posts is Richard Harter, and everything from here on down is his effort, with some minor edits to make it past the filter on Slashdot):
Santa Claus: Lord of the Rings
In the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup there was a disturbingly plausible thread connecting Santa Claus and the Lord of the Rings. Learn about fruitcake as mathoms, the sinister Tom Bombadil, Silmarils on the Christmas tree, reindeer as ringwraiths, and other horrors. The gruesome details follow:
Chad Irby
How do you think Santa got all of his workers?
He ended up with all of the Elven rings, and centuries of malnourishment and mistreatment has resulted in a flock of miniscule elf-slaves.
George Williams
"One ring to rule them all, and unto Christmas bind them."
Sea Wasp
The One wasn't destroyed... Santa got a hold of it.
Makes sense. All those paranoia-inducing lyrics
Kyle Haight
Wonderful. Now I'm going to dream about Santa's terrible jolly red eye.
aRJay
I've just realised, it's worse than that, the books lied. Santa didn't get the ring. The ability to see everything he has an all seeing eye.
Santa is Saur...
*NO CARRIER*
Mark Atwood
"There is, in a tower, far to the north, an Eye, unblinking."
Niall McAuley
As to who Santa really is, which jolly character in LOTR actually gets to *hold the ring in his hand* at one point?
So, old Tom Bombadil does a little ring-palming and sends Frodo off with a lesser ring, then clears off to the ruins of Angband beneath the North Polar ice cap, there to use the power of the One Ring to draw the surviving Orcs to him, to toil beneath the ice in his grim, satanic toy mills.
Sea Wasp
Now THAT is a stroke of genius. And with Bombadil's power PLUS the One's, BombaSauron is able to cause Barad-Dur to topple, etc., at the appropriate time. This implies that Sauron himself WILL come back one day, since his Ring is still intact, though.
Michael S. Schiffer
Of course. "[T]he children know he'll be back again someday." Though that song reflects the conflation of multiple Dark Lords. The magic hat is, of course, the Iron Crown ("he began to dance around" is a memory of when Luthien sang for him in Thangorodrim), and the association with cold and snow is similarly obvious. But the "eye[s] made out of coal" are, of course, Sauron's, which glowed red and fiery like a live coal. And the pipe is, as you'd guess, from Saruman.
Andrew Plotkin
But there were only nine Nazgul -- oh, no, wait, Sauron also brought three of the dwarven rings to himself during the Third Age. Total: twelve tiny reindeer. (Three smaller than the others.)
The Christmas Tree is the sign of Bombadil's power, of course, but... um, why do we traditionally put a Silmaril at the top?
Sea Wasp
Morgoth's Crown, you fool.
Liz Broadwell
Specifically, it's a propitiation ritual -- we act out returning the one that Beren and Luthien stole, in the hope that nobody will blame *us* for the deed of some idiot hero. What'd they want it for, anyway? Not like they did anything useful with it once they'd got it
Jouni Karhu
No. Instead, when the Christmas Tree dies and we carry it outside, it symbolizes the felling of the Trees of Valinor.
John David Galt
Does that mean the Christmas feast celebrates the Kinslaying? As a sort of evil Miracle of Transsubstantiation?
Michael S. Schiffer
Swords and swan-ships, carving knives and turkeys (or geese)... the correspondences aren't exactly subtle. (And we probably shouldn't even get started on the fruitcake-- but think the Haudh-en-Ndengin.)
For the rest of you, It's safe to say that most of the nay-saying geeks out there will wash out of the gene pool by virtue of being unable to procreate (you need to sleep with a girl to do so).
I must say, I've never been one of the Roland haters on slashdot, but then I never knew that he wears orange glasses with a matching shirt
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
I'm not sure why people insist on keeping this farce alive. I think the parents are duped even more than the kids are, based on my own experience...long before anyone stopped pretending that Santa existed around me, I knew what was up. I got a bittersweet kick out of watching grown men and women tell bald-faced lies to my face. And I played them like marionettes, inventing new devious questions about Santa; just enough to make them visibly scramble for an answer, but not enough to make them think I knew the truth. Yet it was pretty disgusting to see adults try to pull one over on kids, depending on their innocence and lack of experience to bully children into nonsense for their own amusement.
Seriously...at what point does someone think it's a good idea to lie to their children like this? Don't give me that shit about it being a good life experience for children to realize not everything is true. You can find a million other examples to show them, without perpetrating a huge falsehood on your own. It's wrong, you know it's wrong, and you will still try to justify it. Because you enjoy, in a sadistic way, the total power you exert over your children. You love playing the propaganda machine and dictator, and threatening them with retribution from a farce you concocted, and watching them squirm. Yet ten years later, you'll be so fucking ignorant as to why your children never listen to you, or trust that what you have to say might be good advice. Well...they may be right.
Lying is wrong, and will have repercussions. Don't buy into this "magical experience" bullshit. You're setting the kids, and yourself, up for a totally unnecessary disappointment. Don't give in to your sick little urge to play god with the helpless, innocent natives.
What's the deal with the Easter Bunny and eggs?
Is that the first time one of my boys asks me if Santa is real, I will confirm his suspicion. If I play cute, and my boy goes on the playground saying "My dad says Santa is real!", I am doing neither of us a favor. I will also threaten him not to tell is little brother. Santa is easy, I imagine when they starting asking me the same questions I have about God.
While Santa was delivering presents, his famous book, which lists all the boys and girls as either being good or bad over the past year, was stolen. The book was protected with "Secure Present Flight" which should have kept it secure, but it is now believed that this information has fallen into the hands of advertising agencies, and the government, threatening privacy and personal freedom everywhere. This is the third theft of this kind just this month, all over the world people are asking "how safe is all this information being collected about me?", and all over the world they're finding the answer is a very certain "shhh!".
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I don't believe Santa exists.
Which is why poor kids get Sweet F.A.
But there was.
No easter bunny. No unicornsIs this close enough? Even the giant unicorn is only as dead as the dodo.
mermaidsThere are mermaids, but society doesn't know how to accommodate them, so the tail is split into two legs.
dragonsCommode? Oh.
fairiesO RLY?
space aliens we know of, etc...Has there ever been an astronaut from one country lift off in another country's spacecraft? If so, that's a space alien.
As Newcleus put it, "Wiki wiki wiki wiki, shut up."
This article seems quite preposterous. As Richard Dawkins points out, belief in Santa is unscientific.
Obviously Santa uses time lord technology to fly his sleigh around and store all the presents inside it. It's bigger on the inside than the outside.
Oh come on. Everybody knows that Santa has kept up with the times. The sleigh and reindeer were used at first. At the dawn of the industrial revolution he switched most of his distribution network to rail. Hence the recurring motif of toy trains as a present--they were tchachkis(sp?) that rail executives gave ol Nic when they were competing for his business. He re-gifted a lot of them, the kids turned out to like them, and the idea got traction. The sleigh does, and continues, to make "good will" tours and show up in various random locations; but Santa contracts most of the delivery out to UPS and Fedex, and the list is maintained by a peer-reviewed volunteer staff who also maintain the "naughty or nice" database. I think it uses MySQL. Santa is up on all the latest tech. He ain't no Luddite, so sleep in heavenly peace tonight. Christmas will come.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
...beowulf cluster involved somehow!
Table-ized A.I.
Mystery Science Theater explains Santa Better than anyone:
...of course, his cheeks WOULD be rosy because it's a VACUUM out there! I mean, Santa's HEART would explode! (becoming hysterical) But HE wouldn't feel it because the capillaries in his brain would pop like little firecrackers (Joel tries to calm him down) due to the blood boiling away in his face like pudding in a copper...OH THE HUMANITY!! (Now both Joel and Crow are trying to calm him down.) And his jolly old belly would start bubbling like a roasted marshmallow, eyes bulging and popping out... AND THE REINDEER--OH THE REINDEER!!!--keep bloating like holiday floats and in turn exploding in a hail of blood and entrails! Prancer--BOOM! Dancer--BOOM!...
Tom: It's quiet in the cold of our own little orbit, starless and bible black. And as I look down on the big blue beam we would call home I think it so near, yet... oh, I wish on that star and I hope that in a little snow-covered house with a warm hearth and a loving family, maybe some kid is looking up tonight and wishing upon us. Oh, and how I hope sweet Santa will fly by tonight, because if he does I'm gonna reach right out and hug that big guy. Oh, for the sound of hooves against the steel hull of the ship. Oh, to see the rosy face of Santa in the porthole, offering me a Coke and a smile... (gradually becoming upset)
Joel: HEY!
Crow: Tom!
Joel: Tom, take it easy! Santa's gonna be okay, buddy.
Tom: You sure?
Joel: Yeah, give him a little credit, okay?
Tom: Phew, what a relief!
Rudolph the Red-shift Reindeer.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I prefer a much stronger, purely logical proof that Santa exists, which I read in a respected mathematical journal a few years ago. We will prove that Santa exists by proving a stronger statement, namely that an existing Santa exists. Clearly, exactly one of the following holds true:
a) Existing Santa exists.
b) Existing Santa does not exist.
Consider b. It is a contradiction, so it is false. Then a) must be true, therefore existing Santa exists, therefore Santa exists. QED.
That's why there's test tube babies--to counteract all the stupid non-geeks and their disgusting procreative sex crap. The more sex can be avoided, the better.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
santas bag is just like dr whos tartis - bigger on the inside than the outside.
That's ok. I'm still playing with last year's Gadget.
--
My SD word for today is "sexual".
Yes. It is time to turn our attention to the evil that Santa commits. Does his magic also allow him to commit more acts of copyright, patent, and trademark infringement in one night than even the worst pirates do in a whole year? This red suited criminal is stealing millions of dollars of potential revenue from poor starving artists and RIAA executives.
Any decent artist out there want to make up a cartoon depicting the RIAA suing Santa in a courtroom?
Lobo - "Hit Man to the Stars" - was contracted by the Easter Bunny to hit Santa. Lobo killed Santa after invading Santa's heavily defended compound along with his bulldog.
Lobo and the bulldog slaughtered the heavily armed (with pop guns) ELF (Elf Lethal Force) militia, then Lobo called Santa out. Santa, appearing as a burly, cigar-smoking, tattooed biker, whipped out a kukri, whereupon Lobo followed suit, and it was on. Both sides got in a few licks until Lobo chopped off Santa's head.
Afterwards, Lobo took over the advanced manufacturing facility and converted it to making nuclear and chemical weapons.
So anything you get from "Santa" tonight is likely to make you - and the rest of your town - glow in the dark.
George Bush, informed of the nuclear capability of the North Pole, has dismissed the threat, saying "Lobo is not a Shiite - or a Sunni - or whatever that religion is."
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. And that is the answer.
No, but it does prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that rich people are good and poor people are bad. Just look at how much more and better stuff the rich kids get.
exist, why don't we come up with some physics on Moses or the resurrection of Jesus? I'd really like to know what the science community says about them.
"He uses a nano-toymaker to fabricate toys grown atom by atom inside the children's homes. "
Are toy manufacturers aware of Santa's gross disregard of their intellectual property?
I smell a massive lawsuit with a settlement in the order of (pinky to mouth) a BRAZILLIAN DOLLARS!
Santa cannot be allowed to continue this flagrant violation of the law. Millions of gainfully employed people in toy factories stand to lose their jobs, due to the selfish actions of this one criminal. Action must be taken, now, so that those good people - whose creativity and hard work provide happiness to untold millions - can continue to work, be paid and thus are able to buy the things to make their life complete.
So, release the hounds! Apply the full force of the law on his ass. For great justice!!
Merry Christmas.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
>> anything to perpetuate this Bull Shit holiday ..
Agreed, Christmas is a Bull Shit holiday....
Actually, Sinterclaas died in December 6, 342.
As for the legend of Jesus, I think he was supposed to be born in the spring according to the book of legends.
Was quantum physics involved to allow a person to walk on water? Was a cloning process involved to allow a virgin to have a baby? Or should we not try to compare a legend with reality?
Santa Claus and his crew really can deliver presents in one night because of their advanced knowledge of electromagnetic waves, the space/time continuum, nanotechnology, genetic engineering and computer science.
Well then, I for one welcome our new jolly overlords.
I was wondering what kind of quantum physics theory or statistical model were going to be explaining Santa this Christmas...
And I was actually disappointed, because it looks like it has become a tradition. Enough already, this isn't news anymore, however entertaining it might be for the next generation.
TARDIS it would seem logical that the Lord of the North would share some bits of the whole TimeLord thing so
1 the riendeer are in fact alien (heck shiny red nose!! )
2 the presents are inside the tardis (or are being made in the tardis
3 he does a stop time thing to do it all in one night
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I mean isnt that the current test of if something exists, it cant be proven to not exist.
...you serious Clark?
After the world's Christian population rose past a certain point some time ago, Santa had to switch to the Infinite Improbability Drive, which "passes through every conceivable point in every conceivable universe almost simultaneously." Just flip the switch and drop the gifts, everywhere at once. Perfect!!!
They didn't watch S05E11 (Three hundred big boys) ?
:)
A hundred cups of coffee and he'll be able to deliver in an instant.
(Same idea was then reused in over the hedge where once character consumes a single can of caffeine, stopping time).
Caffeine is the answer. Lots of it. First stop, Brazil
This signature is DRM protected. By the DMCA, you are not allowed to counteract or oppose to it.
All the toys in the world are currently made in China and sent out on a certain number of ocean freighters. That's a lot closer to the Santa Clause legend than it was 100 years ago, when there was no single place where all the world's manufacturing was done.
As we move forward, the world's toys have to be manufactured in fewer and fewer places by fewer and fewer people because it's more efficient to manufacture all the world's products in one place. The world's toys are being transported by fewer vehicles making longer trips because transportation is expensive.
When Chinese labor becomes too expensive, we'll probably have to do all manufacturing in more inhospitable places like the North Pole.
Before mail order/online shopping, everyone transported their own presents in their own cars. Now a smaller number of UPS trucks and FedEx trucks deliver most of the presents. We're going to have fewer and fewer couriers until eventually one single vehicle takes all the toys from the North Pole and transports them to everyone in the world.
Maybe when Chinese discover how to warp spacetime, this annual shipment will take only 24 hours.
well, good riddance. I don't need my kids playing with a bunch of ignorant children. Children who are fed lies so that their parents can placate their consciences for a year by showering them with gifts, so the parents can go back to ignoring their children and pursuing the great god Mammon. All the while making the children into good little consumer-robots, little automatons prepackaged for introduction into commercial society. One day, when my children rise up and break the backs of the global power-mad commercial entity, your kids will be the first to go. All because of Santa. Merry fscking xmas.
blah blah blah
Actually, the article was about Santa, not Jesus.
As you pointed out, it's the wrong time to celebrate that legend.
Sinter Klaas was born in 280 and died December 6, 342.
The traditional day to honor his life was December 6 for that reason.
I wonder if we dressed up a fat Jesus in a funny suit if the myth of him would become to blatant.
The only way Santa could possibly do his job is to use distributed-processing present-distributing technology. I have already filed a patent on "the claims of section 1, using the Internet and a plurality of one-click parents" My company, Unterseeboot Technologies GMBH, will license the above process for a nominal fee of 2% of the credit card processing costs, or 1.9% if using Paypal.
Once the Chinese have their moonbase, they'll just ship the goods from there.
Seeing as both Santa and the Moon only come out during the Night, it's the ideal central toy depot.
Satan.. errr Santa = The Anti-christ.
fairy n. Offensive. A homosexual man. But I wouldn't use that to a gay man's face.