Is There a Santa Claus?

 As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help
 from that renown scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990) - I am
 pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.
 
 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 man-
 made 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 ammount, 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
 spacecrafts 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.
 

Merry Christmas!