The 12 posts of Christmas: Day 12

On the 12th day of Christmas, Jee looked at Christmas celebrations worldwide. While not everyone around the world celebrates Christmas, we all have a phrase to express well being over the holiday period.  We would like to wish our clients, delegates and visitors to the Jee blog a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year (in several languages)…

 

 

 

• Arabic: Milad Majid
• Brazilian: Feliz Natal
• Chinese: (Mandarin) Kung His Hsin Nien bing Chu Shen Tan
• Dutch: Vrolijk Kerstfeest en een Gelukkig Nieuwjaar! or Zalig Kerstfeast
• French: Joyeux Noel
• German: Fröhliche Weihnachten
• Indonesian: Selamat Hari Natal
• Italian: Buone Feste Natalizie
• Norwegian: God Jul, or Gledelig Jul
• Philippines: Maligayang Pasko!
• Russian: Pozdrevlyayu s prazdnikom Rozhdestva is Novim Godom
• And finally… English: Merry Christmas

On the 11th day of Christmas, there were 4 engineers and a broken car…

There were 4 engineers travelling in a car; a mechanical engineer, a chemical engineer, an electrical engineer and a computer engineer. The car breaks down.

“Sounds to me as if the pistons have seized. We’ll have to strip down the engine before we can get the car working again”, says the mechanical engineer.

“Well”, says the chemical engineer, “it sounded to me as if the fuel might be contaminated. I think we should clear out the fuel system.”

“I thought it might be a grounding problem”, says the electrical engineer, “or maybe a faulty plug lead.”

They all turn to the computer engineer who has said nothing and say: “Well, what do you think?” “Umm – perhaps if we all get out of the car and get back in again?”

 

On the 10th day of Christmas, we heard about some unusual interviews. Here’s a few examples of what NOT to do in your next job interview:

• A job applicant challenged the interviewer to an arm wrestle
• A candidate fell and broke their arm during their interview
• A balding candidate excused himself and returned to the office a few minutes later wearing a headpiece
• An applicant interrupted the interview to phone her therapist for advice on how to answer questions
• Another applicant refused to sit down and insisted on being interviewed standing up…

 

On the 9th day of Christmas three engineers and three accountants went on a train journey…

Three engineers and three accountants were travelling by train to a conference. At the station, the three accountants each bought tickets and watched as the three engineers only bought a single ticket.

“How are three people going to travel on only one ticket?” asked one accountant.
“Watch and you’ll see,” answered an engineer.

They all boarded the train. The accountants took their respective seats but noted that all three engineers crammed into the toilet and closed the door behind them. Shortly after the train departed, the conductor came around to collect the tickets. He knocked on the toilet door and said, “Ticket, please.”

The door opened just a crack and a single arm emerged with a ticket in hand. The conductor took it and moved on.

The accountants saw this and agreed it was quite a clever idea. So after the conference, the accountants decided to copy the engineers on the return trip and save some money. When they got to the station, they bought a single ticket for the return trip. To their astonishment, the engineers didn’t buy a ticket at all.

“How are you going to travel without a ticket?” said one perplexed accountant.
“Watch and you’ll see,” answered an engineer.

When they boarded the train, the three accountants crammed into a toilet and the three engineers crammed into another one nearby. The train departs. Shortly afterward, one of the engineers left his toilet and walked over to the toilet where the accountants were hiding. He knocked on the door and said, “Ticket, please.”

On the 8th day of Christmas, we though you might like this:

A young executive was leaving the office late one evening when he found the Managing Director standing in front of a shredder with a piece of paper in his hand. “Listen,” said the Managing Director, “this is a very sensitive and important document here, and my secretary has gone for the night. Can you make this thing work?”

“Certainly,” said the young executive. He turned the machine on, inserted the paper, and pressed the start button.

“Excellent, excellent!” said the CEO as his paper disappeared inside the machine. “I just need one copy.”

On the 7th day of Christmas we were looking through past Jee Christmas cards and we thought we would treat you to a selection of designs that never made it to print – give us your thoughts on which ones you like… and which ones are just a terrible joke!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the 6th day of Christmas we will take you on a trip across the seas, with footage from a North Sea supply vessel. It will make you glad you are sitting down. It’s worth watching the whole 7 minutes to get a sense of calm… and then storm. If you haven’t got 7 minutes, fast forward the video to 5:45 and test your sealegs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kiu9O7M1mk&feature=related

 

On the 5th day of Christmas, we found a technical article on the logistics of Christmas…

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 (except maybe in Japan) 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 3.5children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming 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 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 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney,jump into the sleigh and get onto 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 purposes 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 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 Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 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 can pull 10 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 reentering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would adsorb 14.3 quintillion 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 mps in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 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. Merry Christmas!

On the 4th day of Christmas, we heard the one about an engineer and a mathematician on a flight.. Here it is for your amusement:

A mathematician and an engineer are sitting next to each other on a long flight. The mathematician leans over to the engineer and asks if he would like to play a fun game. The engineer just wants to take a nap, so he politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks.

The mathematician persists and explains that the game is real easy and lots of fun. He explains, “I ask you a question, and if you don’t know the answer, you pay me $5. Then you ask me a question, and if I don’t know the answer, I’ll pay you $5.”

Again, the engineer politely declines and tries to get to sleep. The mathematician, now somewhat agitated, says, “Okay, if you don’t know the answer, you pay me $5, and if I don’t know the answer, I’ll pay you $50!”

This catches the engineer’s attention, and he sees no end to this torment unless he plays, so he agrees to the game. The mathematician asks the first question. “What’s the distance from the earth to the moon?”

The engineer doesn’t say a word, but reaches into his wallet, pulls out a five-dollar bill and hands it to the mathematician. Now, it’s the engineer’s turn. He asks the mathematician “What goes up a hill with three legs and comes down on four?”

The mathematician looks up at him with a puzzled look. He takes out his laptop computer and searches all of his references. He taps into the air phone with his modem and searches the net and the Library of Congress. Frustrated, he sends e-mail to his co-workers all to no avail.

After about an hour, he wakes the engineer and hands him $50. The engineer politely takes the $50 and turns away to try to get back to sleep.

The mathematician then hits the engineer, saying, “What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down on four?” The engineer calmly pulls out his wallet, hands the mathematician five bucks, and goes back to sleep.

On the 3rd day of Christmas, we read this and thought it related to our Technical Director: ‘To an optimist, the glass is half full. To a pessimist, the glass is half empty. To an engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.’

On the 2nd day of Christmas, an engineer offered us one Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.

Ingredients:

• 532.35 cm3 gluten
• 9 cm3 NaHCO3
• 4.9 cm3 refined halite
• 236.6 cm3 partially hydrogenated tallow triglyceride
• 177.45 cm3 crystalline C12H22O11
• 177.45 cm3 unrefined C12H22O11
• 4.9 cm3 methyl ether of protocatechuic aldehyde
• Two calcium carbonate-encapsulated avian albumen-coated protein
• 473.2 cm3 theobroma cacao
• 236.6 cm3 de-encapsulated legume meats (sieve size #10)

To a 2-L jacketed round reactor vessel (reactor #1) with an overall heat transfer coefficient of about 100 Btu/F-ft2-hr add ingedients one, two and three with constant agitation. In a second 2-L reactor vessel with a radial flow impeller operating at 100 rpm, add ingredients four, five, six and seven until the mixture is homogenous. To reactor #2, add ingredient eight, followed by three equal volumes of the homogenous mixture in reactor #1. Additionally, add ingredient nine and ten slowly, with constant agitation. Care must be taken at this point in the reaction to control any temperature rise that may be the result of an exothermic reaction. 

Using a screw extrude attached to a #4 nodulizer, place the mixture piece-meal on a 316SS sheet (300 x 600 mm). Heat in a 460K oven for a period of time that is in agreement with Frank & Johnston’s first order rate expression (see JACOS, 21, 55), or until golden brown. Once the reaction is complete, place the sheet on a 25°C heat-transfer table, allowing the product to come to equilibrium.  

On the first Day of Christmas, our MD recommends to you…

The Knack: A short Dilbert video http://youtu.be/FlJsPa6UwcM Enjoy!