Worst IT job ever. The North Pole.

Around this time of year I always sit back to a nice cup of eggnog and read my favorite web discussion, The Physics of Santa Claus. This work came originally in a 1990 issue of Spy Magazine physically justifying that if Santa does exist and provides this astonishing feat of delivering more packages than UPS does in a week in one night, then he would be vaporized in 0.0003 seconds due to atmospheric pressures of earth. Of course in all fairness there is several rebuttals to this calculation.

As we end 2008 however there needs to be a new perspective on Santa's yearly task. I want to question Santa's naughty or nice list. Popularized by the song "Santa Claus is coming to town", the naughty or nice list is suppose to comprise of a list of all children with a check-box for naughty or nice on it. According to more recent census figures than the 1990's Spy passage, there is approximately 400 million children who are Christian and still in relative Santa believing age.

So I took the liberty and found that 50 names could fit on one page using Times New Roman size 12 font. 400,000,000/50 = 8,000,000 pages, but lets say that Santa is somewhat ecological he went double sided, so 4,000,000 pages. Why size 12 font, well Mr. Kringle does wear glasses. At any rate according to this wiki.answers.com post about how much paper does one tree make, a 4 by 4 tree that is 8 feet tall could make 90,000 pages. So 4,000,000 / 90,000 = 44.4 * 8 = a 4 by 4 tree 355.55 feet tall. That would be 5688.88 cubic feet of wood. So a mile of wood would be taken yearly to create this list. Using the average thickness of paper of 0.1mm the naughty or nice list would be 0.4 km thick or about 4 football fields in depth. I'm not sure what the size would be if rolled but I can assume it would still be a 50 yard diameter circle and still to cumbersome for humans to use.

Now that the paper list is out of the question lets look at the hardware end of it. Someone suggested to me that Santa uses a PDA. Well it should be noted that the maximum text size of a Word 2003/2007 document is 32 megabytes. 400 million names with the average size of 20 characters and spaces is 8 billion characters divide by MB size (1,048,576) = 7629 MB or about 7.4 gigabytes. Even if this document is broken into time zones, this still violates document maximums. OK so how about a database. Could the database be onboard or can it be at North Pole HQ.

To start the name field would have to accommodate for all names and most likely middle names as well so a field of 100 characters would be required. A boolean yes no is necessary for naughty or nice. In all likelihood there would also be fields for address, GPS coordinates, country, city, state, age, sex, toy tracking number, and a comment field for logistical information such as vicious dog, or thin chimney. Overall I figure about 500 bytes of information for each child. A 200 gigabyte database after multiplying by 400 million records.

Given the Physics of Santa article, Santa has one millisecond to "park, hop out of his 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." I've give this possible system 1/10000 or one ten-thousandth of a second for Santa to input a search criteria, access the record, display the record, and Santa to read this probably while flying. Depending where Santa is at a giving time, no transmission medium known to man can send a request to the north pole, extract it through the seek times of hard drives, obtain the record and send it back to location within 1/10000 of a second. This would beat the speed of light if Santa was below the Arctic Circle. So using the North Pole database would be extremely out of the question. Even so, he would be sending / receiving anywhere between 10 MB/s - 50 MB/s transfer rates, the packet load through the routers would not be able to transfer the data in time.

This leaves only one possibility, that Santa is the fastest speed-reader on the planet and would need extremely fast PC on board capable of performing high-detail algorithmic searches using Solid state hard drives. I'm certain however the tremendous friction Santa takes in while flying will also burn this database as well.

Please send all rebuttals to solutions@calumettech.com. I'll post them as they come in. Just a few side notes.

1. Given that the average typist types maybe 4 records a minute, it would take a team of 190 elves to work non-stop to create the naughty or nice database.

2. Mrs. Claus doesn't do anything and was never given a proper first name other than a few movies.

3. I wonder what the Physics would look like if Santa would do 16 U-shaped loops around the globe, ideally time zone one he heads for Antarctica, then time zone two he returns to North Pole to reload take a 5 minute break and recharge his nuclear powered reindeer.