On Christmas Eve, it is traditional to stagger in late from carol-singing/a champagne reception on the Peak/the boozer (delete as applicable) and leave cookies and a glass of milk for Mr S. Claus Esq. The next morning you notice with satisfaction that the cookies and milk have disappeared and your belief in Santa is underlined for another year. It is, therefore, very disturbing, particularly at Christmas, to read an e-mail Sandra Low passed on which questions whether Santa can actually exist. Or at least whether he can drop off colossal amounts of presents around the world every year without expecting a pay back, like a fatter and jollier version of the IMF. The e-mail, appositely named 'Ba Hum Bug', assumes there are two billion people under the age of 18 worldwide. Santa is unlikely to visit children who are not Christians, which reduces his client base to 378 million. That works out to 108 million homes, given an average 3.5 children per home, presuming at least one child in each home hasn't been naughty all year. Santa has 31 hours to cover the world, given the different time zones, and assuming he and the reindeer fly from east to west. This works out at 967.7 visits per second, which means, according to the Scrooge-like intellect which has worked all of this out, he has 1/1,000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, pop down the chimney, or skirt past the dozing security guard in Hong Kong's case, fill stockings, distribute presents, eat the cookies and milk and return to the sleigh. These 108 million households will mean a total distance of 120.8 million kilometres are covered, given the deliberately wrong assumption these homes are evenly distributed. Therefore Santa is travelling at a zippy 1,040 kilometres per second - 3,000 times the speed of sound. Ba Hum Bug then takes the weight of a medium-sized box of toys as just under a kilogram. If this was the only present children received, it means Santa and the reindeer carry 500,000 tonnes of presents. The junior-sized Ferraris, bulky Versace gear and chunky Nike trainers Santa distributes to youngsters in the SAR would dramatically increase the weight. If land-based reindeer can only pull about 140 kilograms, this would entail employing 3.6 million of them, which would mean the payload of the sleigh would increase by another 540,000 tonnes. The weight of this enormous load creates huge air resistance and the leading reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy every second. They would burst into flames in an instant, exposing the pair behind them and creating deafening sonic booms. The entire team would be incinerated within seconds, after Santa had only reached a handful of houses. Not that this would be of anything but academic interest, since the forces created by Santa accelerating to 1,040 kilometres a second in .001 of a second would pin him to the back of his sleigh and crush the poor man to 'a quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore if Santa did exist, he's dead now,' concludes Ba Hum Bug. That's nonsense - we saw him looking cheerful at Seibu only yesterday . . . A reader who goes only by the name Heena was surfing the 'Net the other day and tried to get into the HotWired Service. Unfortunately the words 'Service Temporarily Unavailable' flashed up since it was down for repairs. There was some comfort offered - underneath the cyberspace out-of-order notice were printed the words 'If you would like help from a live human send us e-mail'. How much help would a dead human be in this situation, asks Heena? After the port city on India's west coast changed its name to Mumbai a couple of years back, there was immense confusion when the Indian Government decided it preferred the old name, Bombay. For a short time those outside the city called it Bombay once more. Now it appears to be Mumbai universally. The changes have confused a lot of people - particularly South African Airways. An SAA newspaper advertisement refers to 'Mombay' - perhaps the airline is hedging its bets.
