Anything to do with Speedy Gonzalez or is this thread wandering OT? :)
At least it is not wandering in the direction of dogs!
Before the mods become too rattled:
THE THERMODYNAMICS OF HELL
Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?
Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law, (gas cools off
when it expands and heats up when it is compressed) or some variant.
One student, however, wrote the following:
First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we
need to know the rate that souls are moving into Hell and the rate they are
leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell,
it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls
are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the
world today. Some of these religions state that if you are not a member
of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of
these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we
can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they
are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now,
we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law
states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the
same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.
This gives two possibilities:
1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls
enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
2. Of course, if Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then
the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.
So which is it? If we accept the postulate given to me by Ms. Teresa
Banyan during my first year, "... it will be a cold day in Hell before I
sleep with you.", and take into account the fact that I still have not succeeded in having sexual
relations with her, then, #2 cannot be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and will not freeze.
and
Santa Claus: An Engineers 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 population records). 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 1000 km per second --- 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moved at a poky 43.2 km per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 24km 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 (1 kg), the sleigh is carrying over 500,000 tonnes, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 150 kg. 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 by another 54,000 tonnes, or a total roughly seven times the weight of the QE2.
IV. A mass of 550,000 tonnes travelling at 1000 km per second creates 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 0.005 seconds, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.
Not that it matters, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 1000 km.p.s. in 0.001 seconds, would be subjected to enormous forces. A 120kg Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by approximately 2,000,000 kg force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
Therefore, even if Santa ever did exist, he's dead now. QED
