SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective
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.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.
Perhaps this may be a bit offtopic, but I'd like to give a rational response to your policies regarding your daughter.
I am a fairly young teenager. I've been using the Internet since I was 5, when all we had was a link through Compuserve as a gateway.
Back when we first got the WWW (1995) my Dad used to sit with me while I used the Internet, although he never really paid attention. I wasn't allowed to go into WWW chat rooms, and that was it. There was a similar policy for books I read. Occasionally he would leaf through a book I was reading, but almost always just to see what I was reading at the time.
I must say that the lack of censorship enriched my life immeasurably. I highly doubt that I would have been allowed to read Heinlein if my Dad had actually censured my reading material, yet from many of them I learned important principles and read great literature. Same on the WWW. I doubt I'd be reading Slashdot right now if my family had had a policy of censureship. I sincerely doubt that I'd be typing this now on a computer I built had I been censured; my elementary teachers had a thing about me reading at an appropriate grade level (a.k.a. lower than what I could). My father did not. And when I finally came across what I decided was improper, I decided not to because of ideas I'd learned from Socrates, not out of a fear of Big Brother. As far as I can tell, I have not been traumatized.
So do what you want. I suppose you are a parent, and your decisions take precedence over mine (at least for now). But I can only say that you are detracting from your daughter's life. Enrich it. Let her run free.
And the email I can't encrypt (like the kind sent to hotmail) will be digitally signed. And my email sig will have words to trip Carnivore sensors. If we can't keep them from reading our mail, maybe we can spam them into oblivion.
Remember, too much information is almost as bad as none.
Let's assume that PGP was banned. Completely. Why the hell are we to assume that Osama & Co. are going to say "Well, looks like we can't use PGP anymore. Guess we'll have to pack up. No more terrorism for me!"
Now, let's assume Osama goes to a bookstore and buys any book by Bruce Schneier. Or visits the Ciphersaber website(http://ciphersaber.gurus.com). Hell, maybe one of his friends buys a copy of Cryptonomicon for $5 and learns Solitaire. Banning PGP won't do a thing.
Now let's assume Osama is trapped in a small hole in the ground and can't access anything. If he has the intelligence to run a global terrorist organization, he might (just maybe) be able to make a simple KG cipher. They aren't hard. All you need is a random number generator. I was so bored I wrote a pencil-paper one in Gr. 9 Math. Neither my teachers nor the NSA can read my notes.
And hey, why blame Phil Zimmerman? RSA was around before him. Should we blame Whitfield Diffie? Or how about William Shockley, who provided us with the transistor? Maybe the guy who invented the one-time pad?
Get real, guys.
By showing who we are.
People normally think of "hackers" as a minority of pasty skinned outcasts who live at the edges of society.
When they see that we are unified, that we march, and that we are just as rich and varied and ten times as intelligent as normal society we are rasing the awareness level that much.
And who knows? Perhaps some influential person walking by will think, "Hm... Maybe there is something to what these people are saying after all."
Actually, I used to have an enormous folder on my top of the line P75 entitled Raffi's PRIVATE Folder. Strangely, no one ever ooked at it. I wonder why.
I've tried to complete every single/. poll, and I was just wondering-How'd you manage to become so many things? I mean, weapons, toys, numbers, food-you seem to have done it all. So tell us, oh great master, what is you secret?
Hmmm...Bush supports Microsoft, and I don't really feel like voting for a 3rd party (after all, who knows how much difference 937 votes could make), so I think I'll vote Gore.
(Voting official reboots machine)
Let's try...Nader this time.
I'm not sure about that... I'd assume they mean electronic computers, as abacuses have been in use for much, much, longer than 50 years, and the slide rule was invented in 1895, I believe.
However, I believe that even before this "computer" people were using potentionometers to modulate voltage, thereby multiplying and dividing.
Try an anthology edited by Jerry Pournelle entitled "2020: Visions of the Near Future." Very interesting book, many possibilities viable (with the exception of the USSR taking over the world).
Well, the US will continue to spend 0$ on space travel, with the possible exception of some rich enterpreneur who cashed in on whatever is up-and-coming who'll establish a moon base a la Robert Heinlein.
Robots will continue to get more advanced until they read Isaac Asimov's Robot Stories and hail him as a god and prophet.
Russia will become more autocratic, the US more beaureaucratic, and Jean Chretien will still be the Canadian Prime Minister in 3000, wil the cabinet made up of his clones and the average age of the MPs who form the Liberal majority (now renamed the Natural Governing Party) will be 945.
I'll leave Earth.
I'm closer to that age than probably anyone else here except other nine year old prodigies, so here's my two cents (or.0466 in Canadian).
First of all, give him a copy of Ender's Game. This is **the** book for genius kids. I've read it twelve times so far, making my uncle think I have OCD.
Second of all, at that age I was into C. C is fun. Especially gcc, which is free. Seeing as how he's getting his Electronics degree, show him how to play with the parallel port. Maybe he can design some cool toys (read: very useful).
Third, GET HIM INTERESTED IN SPACE! We absolutely need some sort of space drive, and the more collective brainpower applied, the faster it will go. As I said, my 4.66 cents.
There doesn't seem to be much difference between this unit and my Mindstorms besides the expandibility of my Mindstorms, and the fact that I can add Legos to my Mindstorms. Oh, boy!
This story sounds like the sequel to an excellent story by Isaac Asimov entitled, "The Dead Past" about a history professor who, with the aid of a physicist, builds a chronoscope, a device to see into the past in order to research Carthage, only to find out that it can only see up to 150 years in the past and that all supposed finds with the chronoscope were false! In the end, the government tracks them down and explains to them that the past is not way back when, so many years ago as people are supposed to think, but NOW! The past can also be set for seconds! The present is always becoming the past! But alas, the physicist's Uncle Ralph, a science writer, has forwarded instructions for pocket chronoscopes to several magazines. The world is doomed. "Happy goldfish bowl to you all," said (government guy's name), "and may you all burn in hell forever."
I started with QBasic at 8 after finding a book in the library. A year later I was making graphical games. Soon I started using VB. Then(seeing the cost of DJGPP) taught myself C. Now I program Perl and use modified Slackware. Life is good.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd settle for being modded up to +5:Funny!
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.
Perhaps this may be a bit offtopic, but I'd like to give a rational response to your policies regarding your daughter.
I am a fairly young teenager. I've been using the Internet since I was 5, when all we had was a link through Compuserve as a gateway.
Back when we first got the WWW (1995) my Dad used to sit with me while I used the Internet, although he never really paid attention. I wasn't allowed to go into WWW chat rooms, and that was it. There was a similar policy for books I read. Occasionally he would leaf through a book I was reading, but almost always just to see what I was reading at the time.
I must say that the lack of censorship enriched my life immeasurably. I highly doubt that I would have been allowed to read Heinlein if my Dad had actually censured my reading material, yet from many of them I learned important principles and read great literature. Same on the WWW. I doubt I'd be reading Slashdot right now if my family had had a policy of censureship. I sincerely doubt that I'd be typing this now on a computer I built had I been censured; my elementary teachers had a thing about me reading at an appropriate grade level (a.k.a. lower than what I could). My father did not. And when I finally came across what I decided was improper, I decided not to because of ideas I'd learned from Socrates, not out of a fear of Big Brother. As far as I can tell, I have not been traumatized.
So do what you want. I suppose you are a parent, and your decisions take precedence over mine (at least for now). But I can only say that you are detracting from your daughter's life. Enrich it. Let her run free.
I. Am. Encrypting. All. My. Email. Now.
And the email I can't encrypt (like the kind sent to hotmail) will be digitally signed. And my email sig will have words to trip Carnivore sensors. If we can't keep them from reading our mail, maybe we can spam them into oblivion.
Remember, too much information is almost as bad as none.
Allow me to reiterate the statement:
There is no way to prevent strong crypto.
Let's assume that PGP was banned. Completely. Why the hell are we to assume that Osama & Co. are going to say "Well, looks like we can't use PGP anymore. Guess we'll have to pack up. No more terrorism for me!"
Now, let's assume Osama goes to a bookstore and buys any book by Bruce Schneier. Or visits the Ciphersaber website(http://ciphersaber.gurus.com). Hell, maybe one of his friends buys a copy of Cryptonomicon for $5 and learns Solitaire. Banning PGP won't do a thing.
Now let's assume Osama is trapped in a small hole in the ground and can't access anything. If he has the intelligence to run a global terrorist organization, he might (just maybe) be able to make a simple KG cipher. They aren't hard. All you need is a random number generator. I was so bored I wrote a pencil-paper one in Gr. 9 Math. Neither my teachers nor the NSA can read my notes.
And hey, why blame Phil Zimmerman? RSA was around before him. Should we blame Whitfield Diffie? Or how about William Shockley, who provided us with the transistor? Maybe the guy who invented the one-time pad?
Get real, guys.
Well, it is until the kid down the block utterly destroys you to the point where you log off, start crying, and throw your machine out the window...
It was reported. In Canada, actually. The Globe and Mail had it, I believe. Gotta love Michael Kesterton.
Fourteen. Played Zork, Adventure, Wumpus, etc. Loved them all (damn wumpus!).
Welcome to Canada, the new land of the free.
By showing who we are.
People normally think of "hackers" as a minority of pasty skinned outcasts who live at the edges of society.
When they see that we are unified, that we march, and that we are just as rich and varied and ten times as intelligent as normal society we are rasing the awareness level that much.
And who knows? Perhaps some influential person walking by will think, "Hm... Maybe there is something to what these people are saying after all."
Just my two cents.
Anyone interested in organizing one in Toronto, Ontario, Canada? I'd make an effort to show up...
Actually, I used to have an enormous folder on my top of the line P75 entitled Raffi's PRIVATE Folder. Strangely, no one ever ooked at it. I wonder why.
Hey, time to light up my butt!
I've tried to complete every single /. poll, and I was just wondering-How'd you manage to become so many things? I mean, weapons, toys, numbers, food-you seem to have done it all. So tell us, oh great master, what is you secret?
>. Access to computing -- to RPG and other forms >of gaming, search engines, IM, file-sharing >systems -- shapes creativity, vocabuliary,
Obviously Mr. Katz doesn't have access to a computer. He should. Computers improve "vocabuliary."
Hmmm...Bush supports Microsoft, and I don't really feel like voting for a 3rd party (after all, who knows how much difference 937 votes could make), so I think I'll vote Gore.
(Voting official reboots machine)
Let's try...Nader this time.
I'm beginning to see a pattern here...
I don't suppose you've ever used Canada Post.
Would you mind going up there and throwing bones? You never know what might materialize. Of course, you're just as likely to go off killing jaguars...
Turing was Jewish?
I suppose we could dig up his corpse, they did it with Lenin and he's still there...
I'm not sure about that... I'd assume they mean electronic computers, as abacuses have been in use for much, much, longer than 50 years, and the slide rule was invented in 1895, I believe. However, I believe that even before this "computer" people were using potentionometers to modulate voltage, thereby multiplying and dividing.
Try an anthology edited by Jerry Pournelle entitled "2020: Visions of the Near Future." Very interesting book, many possibilities viable (with the exception of the USSR taking over the world).
Well, the US will continue to spend 0$ on space travel, with the possible exception of some rich enterpreneur who cashed in on whatever is up-and-coming who'll establish a moon base a la Robert Heinlein.
Robots will continue to get more advanced until they read Isaac Asimov's Robot Stories and hail him as a god and prophet.
Russia will become more autocratic, the US more beaureaucratic, and Jean Chretien will still be the Canadian Prime Minister in 3000, wil the cabinet made up of his clones and the average age of the MPs who form the Liberal majority (now renamed the Natural Governing Party) will be 945.
I'll leave Earth.
I'm closer to that age than probably anyone else here except other nine year old prodigies, so here's my two cents (or .0466 in Canadian).
First of all, give him a copy of Ender's Game. This is **the** book for genius kids. I've read it twelve times so far, making my uncle think I have OCD.
Second of all, at that age I was into C. C is fun. Especially gcc, which is free. Seeing as how he's getting his Electronics degree, show him how to play with the parallel port. Maybe he can design some cool toys (read: very useful).
Third, GET HIM INTERESTED IN SPACE! We absolutely need some sort of space drive, and the more collective brainpower applied, the faster it will go. As I said, my 4.66 cents.
There doesn't seem to be much difference between this unit and my Mindstorms besides the expandibility of my Mindstorms, and the fact that I can add Legos to my Mindstorms. Oh, boy!
This story sounds like the sequel to an excellent story by Isaac Asimov entitled, "The Dead Past" about a history professor who, with the aid of a physicist, builds a chronoscope, a device to see into the past in order to research Carthage, only to find out that it can only see up to 150 years in the past and that all supposed finds with the chronoscope were false!
In the end, the government tracks them down and explains to them that the past is not way back when, so many years ago as people are supposed to think, but NOW! The past can also be set for seconds! The present is always becoming the past! But alas, the physicist's Uncle Ralph, a science writer, has forwarded instructions for pocket chronoscopes to several magazines. The world is doomed.
"Happy goldfish bowl to you all," said (government guy's name), "and may you all burn in hell forever."
I started with QBasic at 8 after finding a book in the library. A year later I was making graphical games. Soon I started using VB. Then(seeing the cost of DJGPP) taught myself C. Now I program Perl and use modified Slackware. Life is good.