Marine Corps General Reinwald was interviewed on the radio the other day and you have to read his reply to the lady who interviewed him concerning guns and children. This is one of the best comeback lines of all time. It is a portion of National Public Radio (NPR) interview between a female broadcaster and US Marine Corps General Reinwald who about to sponsor a Boy Scout Troop visiting his military installation. FEMALE INTERVIEWER: So, General Reinwald, what things are you going to teach these young boys when they visit your base? GENERAL REINWALD: We’re going to teach them climbing, canoeing, archery, and shooting. FEMALE INTERVIEWER: Shooting! That’s a bit irresponsible, isn’t it? GENERAL REINWALD: I don’t see why, they’ll be properly supervised on the rifle range. FEMALE INTERVIEWER: Don’t you admit that this is a terribly dangerous activity to be teaching children? GENERAL REINWALD: I don’t see how. We will be teaching them proper rifle discipline before they even touch a firearm. FEMALE INTERVIEWER: But you’re equipping them to become violent killers GENERAL REINWALD: Well, you’re equipped to be a prostitute, but you’re not one, are you? The radio went silent and the interview ended.
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I used this factoid in the Personal Management MB class:
If the population of the world were reduced to 100 people, 61 would be Asian, 12 European, 14 American (North, Central and South) and 13 would be Africans. 70 would be non-white and 30 would be white. 80 would live in substandard housing, 70 would be illiterate, 50 suffer from malnutrition, 25 are living on $1 (US) or less per day, 47 are living on $2 (US) or less per day, 8 have a computer, 4 an Internet connection, 41 have no basic sanitation and six (all from the U.S.) would own 60% of the total wealth. If you have a roof over your head, a bed to sleep in, a refrigerator for your food and a closet for your clothes, you are richer than 75% of the world’s population.In 2001, about 1.1 billion people (1/5 of the total population) lived on less than what $1/day would buy in the US. Nearly 3 billion lived on less than $2/day. According to Unicef, nearly ½ of the world’s children were seriously deprived.________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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Vietnam Story
A teacher instructs her fifth-grade class to ask their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end. The next day the kids come in and share their stories. “My daddy told me about my uncle Dave,” says one boy. “He was a pilot in Vietnam and had to bail out over enemy territory with nothing but a flask of whiskey, a pistol, and a knife. He drank the whiskey during the drop, then landed in the middle of 20 Charlies. He shot 15, stabbed three, and killed the last two with his bare hands.”“What is the moral of that horrible story?” yelps the mortified teacher.“Stay away from Uncle Dave when he’s drinking.”
_________________________________________________________________________________________ This is old, I remember seeing it when I first hooked up to the internet in 1994. Nevertheless, it continues to provide a good chuckle.
Santa Claus: An Engineers Perspective
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18 ) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (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 (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1,000th of a second to park the sleigh, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into his 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 purpose 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 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, the Ulyssses space probe, moves at a pokey 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 (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeercan 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 eight or even 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).
600,000 tons travelling 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 quintliion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake.
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 accelerating from a
dead stop to 650 miles per second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrigugal forces of 17,500 g’s. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
