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Dear Biomech-L
This is in regards to the "[Fwd: Santa Claus for scientific minded]" posting
presented earlier today on Bioech-L. In all fairness to the less-scientific
viewpoint, I present to you a rebuttle which was forwarded to me earlier
today*.
Enjoy,
Doug Griffin
*(This posting isn't necessarily the view of the author.)
Rebuttal: Several key points are overlooked by the science based study.
1) Flying reindeer: As is widely known (due to the excellent historical
documentary "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," the flying reindeer are not a
previously unknown species of reindeer, but were in fact given the power of
flight due to eating magic acorns. As is conclusively proven in "Rudolph the
Red-Nosed Reindeer" (a no-punches-pulled look at life in Santa's village),
this ability has bred true in subsequent generations of reindeer-- obviously
the magic acorns imprinted their power on a dominant gene sequence within the
reindeer DNA strand.
2) Number of households: This figure overlooks two key facts. First of all,
the first major schism in the Church split the Eastern Churches, centered in
Byzantium, from the Western, which remained centered in Rome. This occurred
prior to the Gregorian correction to the Julian calendar. The Eastern
churches (currently called Orthodox Churches) do not recognize the Gregorian
correction for liturgical events, and their Christmas is, as a result,
several days after that of the Western Churches'. Thus, Santa gets two shots
at delivering toys.
The figure of 3.5 children per household is based on the gross demographic
average, which includes households with no children at all. The number of
children per household, when figured as an average for households with
children, would therefore have to be adjusted upward. Also, the largest
single Christian denomination is Roman Catholic, who, as we all know, breed
like rabbits. Due to the predominance of Catholics within Christian
households, the total number of households containing Christian children
would have to be adjusted downward to reflect the overloading of Catholics
beyond a standard deviation from the median.
The assertion that each home would contain at least one good child would be
reasonable enough if there were in fact an even 3.5 children per household.
However, since the number of children per household is distributed
integrally, there is a significant number (on the order of several million)
of one-child Christian households. Even though only children are notoriously
spoiled--and therefore disproportionately inclined toward being
naughty--since it's the holidays we'll be generous and give them a
fifty-fifty chance of being nice. This removes one half of the single-child
households from Santa's delivery schedule, which has already been reduced by
the removal of the Orthodox households from the first delivery run.
3) Santa's delivery run (speed, payload, etc.): These all suffer from the
dubious supposition that there is only one Santa Claus. The name "Santa" is
obviously either Spanish or Italian, two ethnic groups which are both
overwhelmingly Catholic. The last name Claus suggests a joint German/Italian
background. His beginnings, battling the Burgermeister Meisterburger, suggest
he grew up in Bavaria (also predominantly Catholic). The Kaiser style
helmets of the Burgermeister's guards, coupled with the relative isolation of
the village, suggest that his youth was at the very beginning of Prussian
influence in Germany. Thus, Santa and Mrs. Claus have been together for well
over one hundred years. If you think that after a hundred years of living at
the North Pole with nights six months long that they remain childless, you
either don't know Catholics or are unaware of the failure rate of the rhythm
method. There have therefore been over five generations of Clauses, breeding
like Catholics for over one hundred years. Since they are Catholic, their
exponential population increase would obviously have a gain higher than the
world population as a whole. There have therefore been more than enough new
Santas to overcome the population increase of the world. So in fact, Santa
has an easier time of it now than he did when he first started out.
Santa dead? Some people will twist any statistic to "prove" their cynical
theory.
This is in regards to the "[Fwd: Santa Claus for scientific minded]" posting
presented earlier today on Bioech-L. In all fairness to the less-scientific
viewpoint, I present to you a rebuttle which was forwarded to me earlier
today*.
Enjoy,
Doug Griffin
*(This posting isn't necessarily the view of the author.)
Rebuttal: Several key points are overlooked by the science based study.
1) Flying reindeer: As is widely known (due to the excellent historical
documentary "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," the flying reindeer are not a
previously unknown species of reindeer, but were in fact given the power of
flight due to eating magic acorns. As is conclusively proven in "Rudolph the
Red-Nosed Reindeer" (a no-punches-pulled look at life in Santa's village),
this ability has bred true in subsequent generations of reindeer-- obviously
the magic acorns imprinted their power on a dominant gene sequence within the
reindeer DNA strand.
2) Number of households: This figure overlooks two key facts. First of all,
the first major schism in the Church split the Eastern Churches, centered in
Byzantium, from the Western, which remained centered in Rome. This occurred
prior to the Gregorian correction to the Julian calendar. The Eastern
churches (currently called Orthodox Churches) do not recognize the Gregorian
correction for liturgical events, and their Christmas is, as a result,
several days after that of the Western Churches'. Thus, Santa gets two shots
at delivering toys.
The figure of 3.5 children per household is based on the gross demographic
average, which includes households with no children at all. The number of
children per household, when figured as an average for households with
children, would therefore have to be adjusted upward. Also, the largest
single Christian denomination is Roman Catholic, who, as we all know, breed
like rabbits. Due to the predominance of Catholics within Christian
households, the total number of households containing Christian children
would have to be adjusted downward to reflect the overloading of Catholics
beyond a standard deviation from the median.
The assertion that each home would contain at least one good child would be
reasonable enough if there were in fact an even 3.5 children per household.
However, since the number of children per household is distributed
integrally, there is a significant number (on the order of several million)
of one-child Christian households. Even though only children are notoriously
spoiled--and therefore disproportionately inclined toward being
naughty--since it's the holidays we'll be generous and give them a
fifty-fifty chance of being nice. This removes one half of the single-child
households from Santa's delivery schedule, which has already been reduced by
the removal of the Orthodox households from the first delivery run.
3) Santa's delivery run (speed, payload, etc.): These all suffer from the
dubious supposition that there is only one Santa Claus. The name "Santa" is
obviously either Spanish or Italian, two ethnic groups which are both
overwhelmingly Catholic. The last name Claus suggests a joint German/Italian
background. His beginnings, battling the Burgermeister Meisterburger, suggest
he grew up in Bavaria (also predominantly Catholic). The Kaiser style
helmets of the Burgermeister's guards, coupled with the relative isolation of
the village, suggest that his youth was at the very beginning of Prussian
influence in Germany. Thus, Santa and Mrs. Claus have been together for well
over one hundred years. If you think that after a hundred years of living at
the North Pole with nights six months long that they remain childless, you
either don't know Catholics or are unaware of the failure rate of the rhythm
method. There have therefore been over five generations of Clauses, breeding
like Catholics for over one hundred years. Since they are Catholic, their
exponential population increase would obviously have a gain higher than the
world population as a whole. There have therefore been more than enough new
Santas to overcome the population increase of the world. So in fact, Santa
has an easier time of it now than he did when he first started out.
Santa dead? Some people will twist any statistic to "prove" their cynical
theory.