Posted on 02/27/2002 4:20:00 AM PST by Pharmboy
It actually IS an engineer, who knows how things are supposed to work, but doesn't know how to tell anyone else.
"Too years ago, I cuddn't even spell 'enginear. Now I ARE one."
Take it from one who had to un-stick wastebaskets from their feet.
Well may be for engineering-- seems to me that y'all spend a heck of alot of time converting between units and whatnot-- but you wanna talk about five plus years of specialized education that nobody in industry would hire you for on a Christmas tree, look at physics.
I mean, look at me. Here I am futzing around with low-energy ion bombardment of surfaces and if I'm lucky I'll get a post-doc in plasma phys for a whoppin' $35k when I get out. If I'm real lucky I'll get some r&d position in industry, probably in plasma again... Point is, most of the stuff in my doctoral dissertation will mean dog-waste to employers. You wanna talk about limited usefulness of degrees... I kick myself in the a$$ every day for not going into engineering in the first place... I'd have a friggin' job by now, be making a heck of alot more than I am right now, haha...
The Powers That Be were discussing the difference between physicists and engineers. They couldn't seem to put their finger on it, until one of the PTB decided to set up a little demonstration.
This particular PTB set up a 100 foot room and placed a bag of gold at one end of it. He then placed an engineer and a physicist at the other. "Here's the deal," the PTB explained to the two men. "The first one to get to the bag of gold gets to take it home. The other one gets nothing. But, there are rules. You can only cross half the distance between yourself and the bag of gold without stopping. After you stop, you get to cross half the distance again. If you cross more than half the distance, we'll send you straight home and the other one will get the gold. Do you understand the rules?"
Each nodded his head yes. The physicist immediately realized that he would never reach the bag of gold and sat down to read his latest scientific journal, from which the PTB had interrupted him to set up the experiment. However, the engineer figured that after ten iterations he'd be close enough for all practical purposes and took home the gold.
Shalom.
Half the fun of assembling something is figuring out how to do it without the instructions.
Sheesh, maybe I should have been an engineer. That's scarey.
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 (except maybe in Japan) 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 household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each. 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. 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). 600,000 tons
Traveling at 650 miles 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 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 to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration 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.
Merry Christmas.
He was from Wisconsin and got his engineering degree from Wisconsin School of Mines as I recall
Is Hell exothermic or endothermic? Justify your answer.
He had little idea what to expect, nor how to grade the results, but decided to reward any student who produced a reasonable and consistent reply.
He awarded one A grade.
Most of the students wrote proofs using Boyle's Law (gas cools off when it expands and heats up when it is compressed) or some variant. The top student however wrote as follows:
First, we postulate that if souls exist, then they must have some mass. If they do, then a mole of souls also has mass. At what rate are souls moving into hell, and at what rate are they leaving? I think we can safely assume that once a soul gets to hell, then it will not leave, therefore no souls are leaving.
As for souls entering hell, we must examine the different religions which exist today. Some of these state that if you are not a member of the religion, then you will go to hell. Since there is more than one of these religions, and people do not belong to more than one religion, we can assume that all people and all souls go to hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can thus expect the number of souls in hell to increase exponentially.
Now we must examine the rate of change of volume in hell. Boyle's law states that for the temperature and pressure in hell to remain constant, the ratio of the mass of souls and volume also must remain constant. There are thus two possible conditions:
We can now solve the problem with the 1990 postulation of Theresa Le Clair, the girl who lived across the hall from me in first year residence. Since I have not yet been successful in having sexual relations with her, condition (2) above has not been met. Thus, condition (1) is true, and hell is exothermic.
Old one but always good.
I would countercounter to your counter but I'm on the lab machine and I got to get my happy a$$ home sometime... [sigh]
AUUUUUGGGGGHHHH!!! I'm stuck to FR!
Hate to admit this one, but, I have. These are too funny! I got a new monitor for Christmas, it was just want I wanted!
It's suprising when I pronounce that equation as a word and someone knows what I'm talking about... :)
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