Read on for the satirized, scientific study.

1. No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
2. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total–378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each.
3. Santa has 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 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.
   This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest manmade vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second–a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
4. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that “flying reindeer” (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload–not even counting the weight of the sleigh–to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison–this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
5. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance–this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion–If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.

Source: www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~dufour/HUMOR/Santas.html

Nothing says “family” like a mini-van retrofitted with a transport truck exhaust. No doubt this beauty has style and performance wrapped in a single sea foam-green package.

I am not a huge fan of social networking sites–I am certain it is more of the “social” element and not the “networking” element; after all, who does not like networking?–but Twitter is one more point of contact, which cannot hurt.

For the record, I do not think “church sucks.” The church is the corporate body of Christ. I am, however, opposed to some of the institutional constructs that have evolved (mostly in Western culture) over the last few hundred years. Order and ceremonial observation are great, but not when the purpose and function has long since been lost. I say we have communion with potato chips and Coke.

For those who may not know, Clippy brings cut and paste functionality to the iPhone.  The software has some limitations, mainly that it can only copy from editable fields (i.e. not something like a standard web page). It’s a minor limitation considering that any copy/paste functionality is better than none. The latest version of Clippy even had multiple clipboards.

Unfortunately I had to restore my iPhone the other day.  Much to my dismay, I haven’t been able to find Clippy in either the Cydia or Installer repo sources.

All the Googling in the world hasn’t helped me find this fantastic tool. I’ve even gone so far as to try to manually grab the .deb file but to my surprise, the iSpazio repository doesn’t seem to load. The domain name is registered but attempts to load the site result in a BlueHost “no domain found” error.

So if anyone out there finds Clippy, please let me know!

Update: I was able to find the new repository. Add http://ispaziorepo.com/cydia/apt/ to your Cydia sources and Clippy should once again be installable.

Update 2: It looks like iSpazio may still be having difficulty with their repo (even the new one above seems to be down now–although I was able to use it when I original posted this information). The good news for those who haven’t been able to pick up a copy of Clippy is that it’s available from the BigBoss repo now. This repo is added to Cydia by default so you shouldn’t have to change anything to get it.

While such a discovery wouldn’t normally be so enthralling, I couldn’t help but notice the packaging this fine automotive anti-theft device came in. Not only is The Club a great good mediocre falsely-reassuring, glorified bike lock; it also comes with a money guarantee. Really what can be more reassuring than knowing that if the device doesn’t do its job guarding your $10K+ investment, you’ll be richly rewarded with a whopping $250 – $500?

Click the link for pictures.

One day I had an idea:  Being a fan of the Apple iPhone I couldn’t help but wonder just how great this poster would be with a little product plug.  Bring in Pixelmator and a few minutes with the airbrush tool and now we know.

Click the link for to see the full-size before and after shots.

One really interesting piece of office decor we stumbled upon caught my attention.  I was tempted to buy it–although I’m not sure where I would have put it had I done so.  The glorious embellishment was none other than a laptop stand named Dave.

Pictures are available after the link.

I still like the previous theme, but this new one is a bit brighter and I prefer the horizontal menu along the top.

Dennis has a few other funny videos worth watching on YouTube.

My personal favourite element is the individual in the centre (in the white shirt):  I love how he has to really duck each time the press comes down.