What It Should Have Been

I guess we will read what are on the front page, or at least the headlines, of our national newspaper, The Straits Times, every morning. I do that. After all, all the significant and important news are supposed to be on the front page.

But nowadays I will also turn to the next page immediately to see whether there are any corrections under the heading, What It Should Have Been. I don’t want to repeat anything that was wrongly reported. And it seems it is getting more frequent.

Just this week alone, from Monday to Saturday, there were three corrections. On Tuesday, we were told that it was jeans and not leggings that were selling at a special price; on Wednesday, whether a degree offered by a university was the first degree ever offered outside the country; and on Friday, we were told the name of the company that won an award was wrongly reported.

Well I supposed not knowing whether the above were errors won’t make any difference to my life or those around me. But what if the error does and will affect me. I guess I will have to look out for this column every morning just in case.

There is NO Santa Claus

There has long been a conspiracy in western societies to propagate to children that there is a Santa Claus. Address a letter to Santa Claus, North Pole, and you will get a reply from Santa himself. This will not happen anymore as one of the biggest party to this conspiracy, the US Postal Service, announced that it will be dropping the small Alaska town of North Pole from a popular national programme where volunteers respond to thousands of such letters. For the reason(s) behind this move and the full report, please go here.

Well sooner or later, these children will eventually find out that there is no Santa Claus no matter whether they have been naughty or nice.

Any one intelligent enough, or with a bit more of “santa searching” will eventually see the truth. Otherwise refer to the following inquiry report filed in January 1990.

1) 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.

2) There are two 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, which is about 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 108 million homes. One presumes there is at least one good child in each home.

3) Thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, and assuming Santa travels east to west (which seems logical), he has 31 hours of Christmas to work with. This works out to 967.7 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. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest manmade vehicle on earth, the Ulysses Space Probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeers. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is five times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth 2 (the cruise ship, not the Queen).

5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. This will heat the reindeers up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeers will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeers behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion, if Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.

The Cockpit?

What goes on inside the cockpit, most will not know. It is well secured.

Whenever a pilot wants to use the toilet, a senior flight attendant has to secure one, and then signal to the pilot to come out. Out he comes quickly and the cockpit door is immediately closed. In he goes inside the toilet swiftly and promptly, as if he has been holding for a long time, whilst the flight attendant stands guard outside his cubicle and the cockpit. When he is done, he swiftly and promptly goes back into the cockpit. Almost the same procedures apply when meals are served to the pilots in the cockpit.

Before it became a rule not to open the cockpit door to non-crew members, decades ago, and well before 911, there were instances when the pilots might invite a person or two to go inside the cockpit to have a look.

And here is a true, albeit funny, encounter by my friend’s sister; yes, two decades ago.

She was waiting for her flight at the airport and a pilot walked by. He made a pass at her and asked her whether she wanted to go to the cockpit. Whilst she was pleased she was also wary as she wondered why the pilot wanted her to go to the Cockpit Hotel.

Side note: The Cockpit Hotel, in Penang Road, was completed in 1972 but razed down in 2002 to make way for a commercial cum residential project.

Talking about air travel always reminds of this encounter by a former SIA stewardess (not the one in Perth now).

She was going about to clear the food trays. She asked the passenger, “Sir, are you finished?” The passenger responded, “No, I am British.”

Pilots have the lives of the crew and passengers in their hands literally. If they goofed up not only those on board are in danger, those in the vicinity of where the plane might hit or land are also in danger. As such, no sympathy for pilots whose licences are revoked because of safety violation.

Typhoon Morakot

Last night TVBJ (SCV Channel 48) suspended all scheduled broadcast to telecast live the HK Artistes 88 Fund Raising Campaign for Taiwan victims of Typhoon Morakot which struck the island on 8 Aug 09, falling one year’s worth of rainfall in just three days.

During the four-hour telecast, many past and present actors and singers, including some from Taiwan who flew to HK, performed to raise more than HKD50,000,000 for the victims. I was pleasantly surprised to hear Gary Chao Ge sang an English song, The Greatest Love of All.

In between songs and commercials, I switched over to TVBS-News (SCV Channel 49) to get an update of the situation in Taiwan.

Here are some of the things I learned.

The six badly affected areas are Kaohsiung, Pingtung, Hualien, Taichung, Tainan and Taitung. Apparently the worst in 50 years.

Buildings don’t just collapse when there is an earthquake. They also collapse when there are severe mudslides and floodwaters. A hotel in Taitung County, the Jinshuai Hotel collapsed into the Jhihben River after its foundations were eroded by surging floodwaters. Fortunately all staff and guests were evacuated a day earlier.



70% of the students in an elementary school were either dead or missing.

Thousands of pigs drowned; possible outbreak of disease.

Water supply had been cut off to an estimated 280,000 people. A youth, queuing for water, said he had not bath for the past seven days nor did he dare flushed the toilet.

Because of political sensitivity, US cargo planes cannot be stationed in the affected area. They have to return to an offshore base several hours of flight away. (You go figure this one out.)

Some Taiwanese rescue planes were not utilised as official documentation for the authorisation were either not done or received. (Again, you go figure this one out too.)

In an online CNN poll, 82% of people think that President Ma Ying-jeou should resign because of a nearly week’s delay in assisting the victims. The poll had stopped when it hit 82%, after rapid increase.

Some of the victims were given instant rice or noodle that does not require hot water to cook. Just add about 150 ml of (cold) water into the mix, cover for 50 minutes, and you have instant rice with vegetables. And there are at least six varities to choose from. Perhaps one of the better innovations that is useful and practical in times like these.

So far 126 confirmed dead and more than 24,000 people have been evacuated.