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 US) 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.
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 or something like that. 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 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 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 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 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 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 4,315,015 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.
BAD IDEA
LIGHT POLLUTION (Canary Islands)
Work humor:
Leap of Faith:
(Below is actually our dog, Ed (half pug, half schnauzer, just a crazy dog)
CSI Kindergarten:
DIGITAL CAMERA FOR SALE:
Cuban Computer
3 people who got seriously hurt
Door stop for the lazy:
Worst seat in the house:
Coincidence?
Duct tape magic
Not too smart:
Don’t look now…
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Puns for Educated Minds
1. The fattest knight at King Arthur’s round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.
2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian .
3. She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.
4. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption.
5. No matter how much you push the envelope, it’ll still be stationery.
6. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.
7. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.
8. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.
9. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
10. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
11. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other: ‘You stay here; I’ll go on a head.’
12. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.
13. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: ‘Keep off the Grass.’
14. A backward poet writes inverse.
15. In a democracy it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism it’s your count that votes.
16. If you jumped off the bridge in Paris, you’d be in Seine .
17. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, ‘I’m sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger.’
18. Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns to the other and says ‘Dam!’
19. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can’t have your kayak and heat it too.
20. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, ‘I’ve lost my electron.’ The other says ‘Are you sure?’ The first replies, ‘Yes, I’m positive.’
21. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal: transcend dental medication.
22. There was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.
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Stock Market Report:
Helium was up. Feathers were down. Beef steered into a bull market. Paper was stationary. Fluorescent tubing was dimmed in light trading. Pencils lost a few points. Hiking equipment was trailing. Elevators rose. Escalators continued their slow decline. Weights were up in heavy trading. Light switches were off.
Mining equipment hit rock bottom. Shipping lines stayed at an even keel. The market for raisins dried up. Coca Cola fizzled. Caterpillar stock inched up a bit. Balloon prices were inflated. Scott Tissue touched a new bottom. Knives were up sharply. Sun stocks peaked at midday. Diapers remain unchanged.
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TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM:
> >
> > You have two cows.
> > You sell one and buy a bull.
> > Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
> > You sell them and retire on the income.
> >
> > AN AMERICAN CORPORATION:
> >
> > You have two cows.
> > You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
> > You are surprised when the cow drops dead.
> >
> > A FRENCH CORPORATION:
> >
> > You have two cows.
> > You go on strike because you want three cows.
> >
> > A JAPANESE CORPORATION:
> >
> > You have two cows.
> >
> > You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary
> > cow and produce twenty times the milk.
> >
> > You then create clever cow cartoon images called Cowkimon and
> > market them World-Wide.
> >
> > A GERMAN CORPORATION:
> >
> > You have two cows.
> > You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and
> > Milk themselves.
> >
> > A BRITISH CORPORATION:
> >
> > You have two cows.
> > Both are mad.
> >
> > AN ITALIAN CORPORATION:
> >
> > You have two cows, but you don’t know where they are.
> > You break for lunch.
> >
> > A RUSSIAN CORPORATION:
> >
> > You have two cows.
> > You count them and learn you have five cows.
> > You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
> > You count them again and learn you have 12 cows.
> > You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.
> >
> > A SWISS CORPORATION:
> >
> > You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you.
> > You charge others for storing them.
> >
> > A HINDU CORPORATION:
> >
> > You have two cows.
> > You worship them.
> >
> > A CHINESE CORPORATION:
> >
> > You have two cows.
> > You have 300 people milking them.
> > You claim full employment, high bovine productivity, and arrest
> > the newsman who reported the numbers.
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Make your parents proud:
Mass stupidity:
