Santa and Coal

For Xmas, here's a guest blog by Destruktikon the Elder:

OK, let's think about this:

Santa gives presents to good little boys and girls and leaves lumps of coal for the bad little boys and girls.  But look at the configuration of the sleigh--  a well proportioned seat for the ample girthed Santa to ride in;   a  place for a big bag of toys.  Where the heck does he keep the coal?  

He makes a list and marks it with who is naughty or nice -- suggesting that the proportion of naughty children to nice children is near equal and somewhat dynamic.  If there was a significant skew toward naughty or nice he would employ blacklist/whitelist procedures to make delivery planning easier.  This implies that there has to be a LOT of coal because nearly half of all little boys and girls are "naughty".  (This also raises the question of whether the list is maintained in real-time and if they use transactional guarantees to ensure that the integrity of the list is maintained -- but I won't go into that here -- maybe next year...)

Is there a separate just-in-time delivery process for coal?  If there were and considering the volume of coal delivery required, much more Christmas lore would be directed at that system.  I think we can discount the JIT coal delivery hypothesis.

Is there a supply of coal on board that we can't see?  Probably not because the mass of the sleigh, toys and coal when Santa initiates his route would be considerable -- and if he's hauling coal, it would probably be for an additional power source to supplement the reindeer on the first half of the delivery route when the sleigh and cargo are heaviest.  But coal must not be used for fuel or the sleigh would have a large boiler and smoke stack which is certainly not in any of the traditional images of the sleigh.

Is there coal mixed in with the bag of toys?  If so, wouldn't the good children's presents be sooty and grimy from the coal?  

Are there separate compartments in the bag for presents and coal?  If the density of the coal is significantly different than that of the toys, that may make the bag unwieldy to manage.  Also carrying a bag with a significant amount of coal into every home probably violates some local and regional ordinances.

Does he use his super Santa strength to crush the bad children's presents into black lumps?  That seems especially cruel and would consume a considerable amount of energy.  And it's probably not efficient to produce a toy and then crush it down into a lump just prior to delivery. (Though I admit this option appeals to me at some perverse level.)

No, I think the answer is elsewhere.  Look again at the configuration of the sleigh.  There is a component of the system architecture that can produce dark worthless lumps.  In fact, there are eight of them (nine if you count Rudolf).  So it's not coal that's being left to the naughty children...

I hope you've been good this year.

Lying Scumbags At the Smithsonian's IMAX Theater

The wife and I ventured to DC today for the sole purpose of seeing Tornado Alley, the movie that filmmaker/storm chaser Sean Casey has been making for the past several years. Basically, Sean Casey built the Tornado Intercept Vehicle (TIV) so he could drive into a tornado and film it. He, the TIV, and his crew have been on every season of the Discovery Channel show Storm Chasers. We've been watching the show and have really wanted to see his movie.

Tornado Alley at 4:55pm! Looks good to me!

Well, this morning we checked the Samuel C. Johnson IMAX Theater webpage to make sure it was playing. As you can see from the screencap, it clearly states that Tornado Alley was showing at 4:55pm until December 15. Today being December 10th, one would think the movie would still be showing. Seems pretty damn black and white to me that Tornado Alley was playing. So, we headed out to see that showing of the movie.

Now it's not an easy thing to get to the Museum of Natural History, where this IMAX theater is. We need to drive down I-95 and then ride 3 different Metro lines, each of which was single tracking, which causes huge delays. So it took a while to get there. We showed up around 4pm with plenty of time to get tickets and see the movie.

When we arrived at the museum, we saw this:

Tornado Alley 4:55! (Those with keen eyes will notice I took this picture at 5:21pm, which was after I decided I needed evidence.) There was also a small card nearby with all the IMAX movies that were showing with Tornado Alley at 4:50. Close enough, but the card had been removed before I had a chance to take a picture.

When we approached the counter to get tickets for Tornado Alley at 4:55pm, we were presented with this:

Dinosaurs?! I don't want to see dinosaurs! No one built a dinosaur tank to drive into the middle of a dinosaur! We complained to the manager, who basically said we should have called the theater before we left. Why the hell would I call the theater? It said in no less than 3 different places that are run by the Smithsonian that Tornado Alley was showing at 4:55pm on December 10, 2011. Plus, anyone who would go through the effort to check the website clearly has a specific movie in mind that they want to see.


It takes 4 seconds to update a website so this won't happen, but I guess that's too much for the Smithsonian. The girl at the counter told us we were the fifth group of people that day to complain about the change.

Epilogue
Defeated, we went to see the National Christmas Tree. What a complete failure that was, too! First of all the tree this year looks like total crap. You know the Rockefeller Center tree in NYC? Got that nice upside-down tornado shape in your head? Now make it wider and lumpy and asymmetrical and you have the National Christmas Tree. And for some reason, they blocked off the pathway around the tree, so you couldn't see any of the state trees for states after the letter M. We did see the Maryland tree and it was wonderful. The DC tree sucked, which was fitting because DC sucks.

A Shocking Revelation About Mario

Small Mario: 3 fingers and a thumb.

Big Mario: 4 fingers and a thumb.