Bob the Sane's Moment of Clarity

An Engineer’s View of Santa Claus

No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total – 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each.

Santa has 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 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.

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When same-sex marriage was a Christian rite

A Kiev art museum contains a curious icon from St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai in Israel. It shows two robed Christian saints. Between them is a traditional Roman ‘pronubus’ (a best man), overseeing a wedding. The pronubus is Christ. The married couple are both men.

Well well well, isn’t this an interesting little tidbit to find out there on the Intarwebs.

It would appear, gentle reader, that way back in the day (even into the 1600′s) that the Christian church performed gay marriages. There are Christian liturgical writings that exist that formalize how to perform same-sex holy unions, and document multiple instances of such unions taking place across several centuries.

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An article I wrote for the Southwest Ghost Hunter’s Association a few years back. Enjoy!

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Stories of spirits, ghosts, demons, and encounters with otherworldly entities abound throughout the histories and literature of literally every culture the world has ever produced. Tales of helpful spiritual guardians, spiteful faeries, and vengeful wraiths figure prominently in many ancient stories. And they continue to be a topic for which modern man holds at least some fascination, given the number of movies released each year which deal with encounters with the supernatural. However, beyond the entertainment one may enjoy by telling ghost stories around a campfire, there is truly fascinating research being conducted into the realms of what is usually termed ‘supernatural’. Researchers have, for more than a century, sought to plumb the depths of the unknown to find out what may lie beyond the cessation of life in the physical body.

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