I don’’t normally post about “nerdy” things. I’ve tried to stay away from it really. But… recently a couple topics have come to light that I want to pass along. This is the first.

Facebook has a couple new features. One is named “Pulse”, and it shows what’s popular with Facebook users at your school compared to all Facebook users - not a bad feature, though I find it hard to believe “The Notebook” is the #1 movie at HSU.

Also new is the ability to define how you know your friends… which is kind of neat, but say you define that you know a person because you dated them - it then shows fields to fill in how the relationship went, what your relationship is like now, and when the relationship occured… personally, that’s a bit too much info.

Info… but isn’t that what Facebook is all about? Well, yeah - in more ways than you or I know. Facebook has come up recently in the tech-web community a couple times, mostly because of the innovative things they’re doing, but the article that most recently caught my eye was an in-depth look at Facebook’s contributing venture capitalists (specifically the ones with potential ties to the CIA), and it’s privacy policies

For instance, the last part of Facebook’s policy on collected information states:

“Facebook also collects information about you from other sources, such as newspapers and instant messaging services. This information is gathered regardless of your use of the Web Site.”

Is that not the least bit disturbing?

The article was posted by Jacob Morse, and if you are interested, I’d encourage you to read it here. While some of the points he makes are guesses at best, it does stir up some interesting thoughts. Don’t get me wrong, I love Facebook - but wouldn’t it be creepy if the Facebook turned into a government database?

While he doesn’t bring this up, do you know who invented the internet? If you answered “Al Gore,” you’re way off. It was a pet project of DARPA - a government owned/operated defense research agency. You think the government ever really let go of it’s control? No… in fact, the government still owns (and is fighting the UN to keep control of) the root DNS servers… I realize that most of you don’t know what a root DNS server is, but think of it as the phonebook for the internet - the name and number address for every website in the world. And they won’t let go of it because… ? Well, no one knows, really.

All this said, and sadly, most of the American public will never care. Most of the American public will say that the government needs this kind of control over the Internet to keep us safe… I for one am not so sure about that anymore. I’m not really big on consipiricacy theories, but with all the hubbub to do with the government and it’s collection of personal information lately, this looks more like fact than fiction.

On the lighter side of nerdiness, check out this engineer’s perspective on Santa Claus:

Santa: An Engineer’s Perspective

I. 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 house hold, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

II. 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 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, 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 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 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.

III. 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).

IV. 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 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 accellerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. 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.