General – Page 7 – Ian’s Thing

No Time For Books

November 28, 2021November 28, 2021 IBM 2 Comments

Each year I add a reading challenge to Goodreads. Each year I fail. Once upon a time, I would get through three or four books from the library in a week or so. What happened?

For one thing I don’t have as much free time as I used to have. Certainly as a kid and even as a young teen, I had plenty of free evenings in which to indulge.

As the years went by, I discovered outside activities; youth clubs and then night clubs! Full-time work got in the way too.

Over the years though, the amount I read has slowly increased again, so what gives with not meeting that challenge? It’s a low amount, usually twenty books a year. I used to read almost that many in a month all those years ago.

Simply, I don’t read as many books as I used to. I don’t really use my local library very much, which is sad to say. I do buy physical books from time to time, and I also have a Kindle membership and an Audible one too. They count towards my reading challenge though.

Thing is, much of my reading these days is online. Not so much social media; much of that is like reading a trashy tabloid. I read various blogs that attract my interest and I’m a great fan of Medium, where I have a membership.

I also subscribe to several magazines and newspapers.
The Telegraph, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Spectator, The Economist, The New Statesman, The Best of British, The Oldie, Chap, and Idler.

By the time I’ve read these, I simply don’t have much time for books! Also, by and large, I’m a non-fiction reader, so when I do read a book it tends to be historical, biographical or some kind of reference manual.

All in all though, I think I probably read now as much as did back when I was a kid, if not more.

Keeping A Journal

November 6, 2021November 6, 2021 IBM Leave a comment

Do you keep a journal? Why? I do. Why? Because I like to make a note of things that I’ve been doing so I can look back on it in years to come. Also, after my demise, there will be a little history for my descendants to read. Perhaps they’ll even find it slightly interesting in a couple of hundred years or so.

In the past, we’ve really only been able to read rich people’s history. Way back, only the well=to=do had any kind of formal education and learned to read and write. The peasants relied on what they were told and they had no way of checking if they were being told the truth or not. Nowadays. there’s so much information out there that it’s still difficult to know whether we’re being told the truth or simply someone’s biased opinion.

We all see, and perhaps report, events in front of our eyes in different ways. We all have, often unconscious, bias. Some is passed down by our parents; some is developed from our own life experiences.

One of the problems in this day and age of having a free-for-all public stage in the guise of social media is that most of us shout from it, but few listen to it. We also tend to only consume media (of all kinds) from sources that we feel aligns with our own bias or ideology, instead of exploring and listening to what the ‘other side’ is saying and/or doing.

Anyway, getting back to my journal. I don’t really make many opinionated comments. I simply record what I’ve done that day. Right now, I’m going to get myself another mug of coffee.

How Santa Met His End

December 21, 2020December 21, 2020 IBM Leave a comment

There are about 2 billion children of the age 18 or below in the world, but since Santa Claus will ignore those believing in Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and Buddhism (except Japan), therefore according to the data from Census, the workload of Santa Claus includes only 15% of all the children, i.e. 378 million. According to statistics, there are on average 3.5 children in each family, so if we assume that there is at least one good child in each family, then Santa Claus has to go to 108 million families.

Thanks to the self rotation of the earth and different time zones, if Santa Claus starts his journey from the East, and goes along to the West, then he would have around 31 hours of Christmas to finish his job. In this period, he must visit 967.7 families per second, i.e., putting the gifts in the stockings, placing the remaining gifts under the Christmas Tree, climbing up the chimney, jumping on to the sleigh and depart for the next family.

For simplicity, let us assume that the 108 million families are evenly distributed on the surface of the earth. Then, the average distance between 2 families are about 780m, and the whole journey is as long as 75,500,000km, and this doesn’t include taking rests and going to bathroom. Therefore the Santa Claus’s Sleigh needs to travel in a speed of at least 650km/s, about 3000 times the speed of sound. Comparatively, the fastest ever artificially accelerated solar probe – Ulysses, travels at a sluggish speed of 27.4km/s only. Superman can fly at 1km/s. An ordinary reindeer at most can just run at 15km/h.

There is another issue about loading. Assume that the gift that each child receives is just an ordinary Lego package (about 2 lb), then merely the gifts will consist of 500,000 tons. On earth, an ordinary reindeer can pull a weight of 300 lb. Assume that a flying reindeer has 10 times the power of an ordinary one, then Santa Claus still requires 360,000 flying reindeers to transport the gifts. But the total weight of 360,000 flying reindeers itself weights over 54000 tons, together with a sleigh that can afford such a weight of loading, this makes the total weight over 600,000 tons. This is about the weight of 30 Godzilla, or 78 Queen Elizabeth Ocean Liner.

Similar to a space shuttle traveling back to earth, an object of 600,000 tons traveling at a speed of 650km/s in the atmosphere will have friction with the air and generate heat. The 2 reindeers in the front of the group will absorb 1.43 x 10^19 Joule energy per second, this make the poor reindeers explode in an instance, and the power will involve all the other reindeers behind and all of them will explode into ashes. Furthermore, the Ultrasonic wave pulse generated by traveling at 3000 times the speed of sound will destroy all the troop of reindeers, the sleigh and the gifts, everything will dissipate into thin air in the period of 0.00426 second, this is exactly when Santa Claus reaches the 5th family.

However, all of the above are not important anyway. This is because when Santa Claus accelerated from rest to 650km/s in a period of 0.001 second, (recall that Santa Claus need to visit about 1000 families in 1 second) he must withstand 17,500G of gravitational acceleration. Even if Santa Claus is as slim as 250 lb only, he will still be crushed onto the backseat of the sleigh by 4,315,015 lb of pressure acting on him, crushing his organs and skeleton in an instance, leaving only a mince of meat.

Therefore, if there were Santa Claus, he would be dead.