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Can your laptop cut bread? The macbook air can.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/27/german-users-claim-macbook-air-can-cut-through-bread-flesh/
Engadget has an article on how the mac book air is sharp enough to cut through a roll, and your arm.
I think the only danger my notebook poses is the possibility of blunt trauma.
HT: Engadget via Collide Magazine
Santa Claus: from an Engineer's Perspective
We've all seen this before in a post, or email, but
I can't help but share it again. It puts a smile on my face every time
I read it...
There are approximately
378 million Christian children in the world
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.
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. This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that
for each 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 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.
The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting
element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized
Lego set weighing two pounds, the sleigh is carrying over 500,000 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 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.
Six
hundred thousand 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. 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 acceleration from a dead stop to 650 miles per
second in one-thousandth of a second, 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 4.3 millions pounds of
force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a
quivering blob of pink goo.
Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
Merry Christmas!
(HT: Mark Batterson)
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