til hamingju með afmælið Hrafn, og þakkaðu henni mömmu þinni fyrir kökuna. mmmmm, hún var næstum jafn góð og.... margt annað sem ég hef borðað. namminammi.
mikið er gott að borða.

Ekki fyrir jólabörn...

það var dagurinn fyrir jól og litlu góðu bandarísku börnin Bobbie og Barbara settust í fangið á pabba sínum fyrir framan arineldinn. þau voru í nýju fallegu bangsímon náttfötunum (eins og döggu systir langar í jólagjöf) og voru nýkomin úr baði svo þau lyktuðu mjög vel.
pabbi þeirra, Jack Eðlisfræðingur, var að lesa fyrir þau úr einhverri góðri jólabók. þá spyr Bobbie allt í einu:
"pabbi, er jólasveinninn í alvöruinni til?"
bæði börnin horfðu spennt á pabba sinn sem lokaði jólabókinni og horfði hlýlega á fallegu börnin sín. þau vissu að nú myndu þau loksins fá að heyra alvöru jólasögu.
"elsku börn...." byrjaði hann, "nei, jólasveinninn er svo sannarlega ekki til, og ég skal segja ykkur af hverju....."

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 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 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 crappy 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 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 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.

V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.

Merry Christmas!

ég var á labbi. sem er nottla ekki í frásögur færandi, nema fyrir það að ég rakst á mjög undarlegan dreng. hann var mjög aumingjalegur og fór eitthvað að tala við mig, og af öllum tungumálum, á ENSKU!
ég reyndi nottla að vera almennileg og spjallaði soldið lengi við hann. var þetta mjög furðulegur drengur og var alltaf að spurja um einhverja hluti sem ég skildi eiginlega ekki.
"where is the goverment of iceland, the magical department?"
"can you tell me how to say a magic in icelandic?"
"im very hungry"
já það eru kannski ekki margir sem vita það, en Harry Potter er fæddur árið 1980. þeas, líffræðilega, samkvæmt bók nr. 3. þannig að í dag er hann 22 ára.
veskú.