A New Year is approaching…

There is a consented feeling that January 1 at 12 am is a point of inflection, that we are turning the page into a new chapter of our lives. A general unfounded hope that next year will be better than the one that is at the verge of disappearing; a cheap and irrational hope that new opportunities will appear which will compensate for recent failures and make of the previous year a distant past.

But… why don’t we have this same hope and excitement in August 1, November 1, or some other ordinary day?

Our human nature is obsessed with time. Year after year we cheer with the ones we love, and hope… hope that maybe this year we will make a difference… hope that maybe in this year we will achieve that goal for which we have been striving so hard.

Knowledge is relative to cultural constructions which are ultimately merely ideas, not real things existing in themselves, Immanuel Kant proposed. We are conditioned and have been deeply influenced by these collective feelings that give hope to the masses. We live in such a structured society that everything is based and conditioned by time, even our feelings and beliefs.

A new year is approaching. Is it a new beginning? Should we expect anything different from those last 365 days? Well… yes we should. Our limited minds and imagination need some sort of motivation to provide a sense of direction to our lives; through the ages, different schools of thought, religions, and society as a whole, have provided this motivation. Why would we stop now? We, as merely human beings, need this kind of motivation. This is why we gather together with our friends and loved ones for December 31, share anecdotes and hope for the future, passing this tradition from generation to generation.

I wish you success in all your future endeavours, regardless of any time boundaries. Happy New Year!!

Does Santa really exist?

This is the time of the year (well actually in the US it has begun about one month ago...) when young and not so young children start writing Santa letters with their Christmas wishes. I got this some time ago in Spanish, and I think it's worth the time spent translating it. Don't check the accuracy of the math involved...

Merry Christmas to you all!!

P.S. Don't expect anything from Santa ;)

Does Santa exist?

As a result of an overwhelming lack of petitions, and with the help of the prestigious scientific magazine “Ten Minutes”, the following conclusions have been obtained as regards to the existence of Santa Claus.

1- No known species of deer can fly. However, there exist 300,000 species of living organisms pending of classification, and even though most of them are insects and germs, it’s not possible to completely discard the possible existence among them of the flying reindeer that only Santa Claus knows.

2- There are about 2.000 million children in the world (only considering those who are less than 18 years old), but as apparently Santa Claus does not appear to care about the African children, Hindus, Jews, and Buddhists, the amount is reduced to a 15 % of the total, about 378 million, according to the World Statistics and Census of Population. According to these statistics, it could be calculated a median of 3,5 children per home, so we are talking about 91,8 million homes, assuming that in each home there is at least one good child that did the homework and did not cause any problems.

3- Santa Claus has 31 hours in Christmas Eve to do his job thanks to the different time zones and to the rotation of the Earth (it is supposed that he travels from east to west, which seems logical…) This suggests 822,6 visits per second. In other words, in every Christian home with a good child, Santa Claus has one thousandth of a second to park, get out of the sleigh, go down the chimney, leave presents under the Christmas tree and in the stockings, eat whatever was left for him, climb the chimney, get on the sleigh, and go to the next house. Assuming each of these 91,8 million stops is uniformly distributed over the surface of the earth (which is false but could be used for these calculations), there is 1,2 Km between each house.
This gives a total distance traveled of 110 million kilometers, without considering the stops to do what all of us would do at least once in 31 hours. It is deduced from this that the sleigh of Santa Claus moves at about 1000 km/s, 3000 times the speed of sound. In comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses spacecraft, moves at a miserable 43 km/s, and a conventional deer runs at a maximum velocity of 24 km/h.

4- Another interesting fact to consider in this study is the weight that this sleigh has to support. Assuming that each child only receives a medium size gift (say 0,9 kg), the sleigh transports 321,300 tons, without considering Santa Claus who is usually described as being a little chubby and plump. In the Earth, a conventional reindeer is not able to carry more than 150 kg, so even if the flying reindeer could carry ten times that weight, it would not be enough eight or nine, but it would be necessary about 214,200 reindeers. This would increase the weight to about 353,430 tons (without considering the weight of the sleigh itself).

5- 353,000 tons traveling at 1000 km/s create a huge aerodynamic drag that will result in an extreme heating of the reindeers similar to the one that suffers a space shuttle when reentering the atmosphere. The couple of reindeers that would go in the front will each absorb a trillion Joules of energy per second. In a few words, they will caught on fire and instantly disappear, leaving exposed the 2nd pair of reindeers running behind. Not only this, but also deafening sound waves will originate in the process. As a result, the eight reindeers will vaporize in 4,26 thousanth of a second.

Santa Claus, meanwhile, will suffer centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times stronger than the force due to gravity. If Santa Claus would weight 120 kg (that would still be too slim) he would be violently pulled against the wall of the sleigh with a force of more than 20 million Newtons.

Therefore, if Santa Claus ever existed and took presents to the children in Christmas, now he is dead.