Theme Week, Part Coal

Jeremy's Sametime Status Proudly Presents:  Santa Week!  

Depending on worldwide naughtiness levels, Santa can be up to the world’s 9th largest annual consumer of coal

It sounds like a lot, but with green energy taking more and more of the worldwide marketshare, coal usage has been down a bit the last few years.  

Believe it or not, there are elves who keep track of expenses and supply chain, in addition to the toy makers and aforementioned logistics specialists.  The North Pole really is a remarkable enterprise these days.  One of the things that they keep careful track of is general naughtiness levels around the world in order to properly gauge the amount of coal needed for any given Christmas.  That statistic, along with world population and median coal lump size (did you know that the median lump of coal given to kids on the naughty list is 8.3 pounds?), are critical factors in coal supply reliability.  Santa running out of coal would be nearly as big a problem as running out of toys.

So, the usual suspects are obvious.  The electricity producing industry makes up the majority of the top users of coal in the world, in addition to metal production and art supply companies.  Given the sheer scope of his work, though, Santa routinely comes in somewhere in the top 25 annual users of coal worldwide.  In a particularly naughty 2008, his ranking went all the way up to 9. 

We hope you have enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at Santa and his toy empire as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you.  The Jolly Old Elf is a mere one week away from his yearly journey, and we hope he arrives at your house safely and with lots of goodies for you.  If you do get coal...well...keep you fire stoked and be less naughty next year.  

And that does it for me, kids.  That's right, in light of my complete inability to properly budget my vacation days, and being busy enough at work that I couldn't always take them when I wanted to anyways, I'm done for 2014!  I look forward to entertaining everyone again in 2015.  

Jeremy Is In The Office will be Out Of The Office starting tomorrow, returning on monday, January 5th with a brand new 2015 full of mirth, merriment, and possibly some major surprises.  Have a safe and happy holiday season full of toys, cookies, lights, and egg nog, and we'll see you all in January! 

Theme Week, Part Chimney

Jeremy's Sametime Status Proudly Presents:  Santa Week!

Santa personally commissioned Bruce Springsteen to liven up that song


It was probably for the best.  The original was a little stale.


Well, such is the problem with an awful lot of Christmas music.  The vast majority of it is bland rehashes of the same old stuff, with no real creativity involved.  In fact, I have a remarkably long rant about Christmas music that needs to be filmed and produced at some point.  Maybe if somebody wants to tuck a digital production studio under my tree this year, that could happen.  Regardless, most Christmas music happens when some reasonably well-known artist decides to pick up a guitar and record "their" version of the same old Christmas carols for no purpose other than to make money exploiting their fans.  Every Now And Again, somebody will Come Along and do Something Really Unique Or Special with a Beloved Christmas Carol, but those truly are the exception.  Most of the time, they're crap.  Somebody shows up at a studio and decides to record "White Christmas" and make the world forget about that Crosby guy.  Spoiler alert...it doesn't happen.

In much the same vein, Santa Claus has an image and a brand that are remarkably difficult to maintain and update with the ever-changing times.  I mean, really...when people think of Santa Claus, they don't usually think of this guy:

 He didn't even have his fuzzy red jacket until the late 1860s.  He wore yellow until 1864, he smoked a pipe until the 1902, and wore Army fatigues during WWII.  He's always keeping up in order to keep his brand relevant to the children of the day.  He's awesome like that. 

So in the 1970s, Santa and his team decided to work their way into the rock and roll era, so an update to a famous Christmas Carol seemed perfectly appropriate.  The iconic "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" was a widely known song pretty much since its introduction in 1934, and already had a number of recorded covers at the time.  Santa studied and interviewed various bands to select one for his new rock anthem before ultimately settling on Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.  Rumor has it the late Clarence Clemons was a big fan of Santa's at the time, which led to his specifically getting a shout-out in the live recording.  The Boss happily accepted the project and created a truly unique and one of a kind recording of the beloved carol for the ages. 

Theme Week, Part Cold

Jeremy's Sametime Status Proudly Presents:  Santa Week!

The physics of supersonic reindeer are remarkable


In one of the most often asked questions about Santa's annual journey, the speed of the sleigh is extremely high in order to circumnavigate the globe in a single night.  Basically covering an entire time zone's worth of houses every hour.  This leads to some interesting physics questions and answers.  In today's look behind the scenes of Santa's enterprise, we examine the physics of supersonic flight in reindeer.  


So, we all know that Chuck Yeager was the first human to break the sound barrier in his X1 airplane.  However, a particular elf and his reindeer have been taking part in supersonic flight for ages.  It truly is an impressive feat. 

Anyone who has studied high-speed flight (not this guy) knows full well that simply applying more force to a flying object is completely insufficient to break the sound barrier.  The leading edge shockwave and lateral profile cause drag to increase exponentially as you approach Mach 1.  Then, once you're past the sound barrier, inertia coupling takes over and causes all sorts of stability problems, since reindeer obviously don't have large empannages or stability augmentation systems.  It's a problem, people! 

So the fact that Santa's reindeer are able to avoid these traditional flight engineering problems is unique to this species.  Fortunate for all of us, really, since we have to get our toys on time. 

Theme Week, Part Snow

Jeremy's Sametime Status Proudly Presents:  Santa Week! 

83% of the elves now work in receiving and distribution, not toy making

It's interesting how the world has changed since the early days of Santa.  

Unlike my still-in-pre-production idea of a Post-Apocalyptic Search For Santa, the real Santa Claus is a delightful guy.  I've met him on many occasions in the past, and in fact, he just came through my grocery store over the weekend.  He seemed thrilled, but was surrounded by too many kids for me to get a chance to chill with him.  It's okay.  

In the past, it's a well-known fact that the elves in the North Pole Workshop make toys.  Lots of them.  I mean, seriously...there are hundreds of millions of kids out there who need toys.  The problem quickly became the fact that Christmas got very commercial, and kids' taste in toys became very specific.  The typical elven wares of trains and blocks and houses and such weren't what kids were going for anymore.  Santa, of course, learned this very quickly because he takes all his own polling data in malls before the holidays, in the form of kids telling him what they want for Christmas.  It's a bit of subtle subterfuge, but it gets the job done, and the kids never seem to mind.  The bottom line in that very specific, name-branded toys were the predominant needs for the kiddies.  

Not to be left in the dark, Santa went to work very quickly, using his remarkable brand to cut promotional deals with nearly every manufacturer of toys, gadgets, games, and wanton avarice in the world.  The end result is that now, Santa is able to deliver the exact make and model toys kids want without all of them being designed and built in his workshop.  He actually managed to get companies like Sony and Mattel to do all of his R+D for him and provide him with their goods at ridiculously reduced costs.  

Unfortunately, this does result in some decreased need for skilled labor in the workshop.  The olden days of toy crafters being top of the heap really are no longer.  However, Santa, being the stand-up guy that he is, never had a layoff of a single worker.  The elves merely spent some of their summer hours actively retraining for jobs of the modern era, and went right back to work the following Christmas as logistics and distribution experts, making sure that all of the toys arrive at the North Pole on time and are staged and ready to go when the sleigh takes off.  It's an enormous undertaking, but one the tireless elves are up for.

Come back all week, as we present more odd and wonderful facts about the Jolly Old Elf for your edutainment. 

Never!

Just how obnoxious do Android commercials need to get before I ponder switching to iOS?  

I would guess that they'd have to go really far over the edge for that to happen.  But then again, you're an Android fanboy, so you're biased.

Well, there's part of the problem.  Phones are a very personal thing, and the selection of your phone can be a deeply profound matter for people.  Or they'll just buy what's popular.  

Sure, there are "Windows Phones" out there, but realistically, in the world of Smartphones, you have two choices.  Apple's iOS, and Google's Android.  They both have their merits as well as intensely loyal fanbases.  Android has much more variability in the available phones, the top tier of which have had the best hardware for at least the last three years, and has a more open environment for developing apps.  Apple's iPhone has a level of brand recognition that Android can only dream of (how many of you refer to any smartphone as an iPhone, regardless of manufacturer...same with any tablet computer being referred to as a iPad?) and is, in fact, the single best-selling smartphone on the market.  

More importantly, no Android user worth his or her salt would even contemplate switching over to an iPhone, nor would an iPhone user "reduce" themselves to an Android device.  It's not that one is actually demonstrably superior to the other, it's just how the world works.  

That said, we're in the time of year when we get inundated in commercials all about stuff we're supposed to buy people for Christmas.  Usually cars, but we do get the occasional phone ad mixed in there for good measure.  Every phone manufacturer runs commercials for their devices, but only recently have I noticed the Android operating system itself is running commercials, ostensibly advertising a vast number of devices all at once in an attempt to gain market share from iOS users (even though currently somewhere around 80% of Smartphones run Android).  This would be all well and good (especially since I rarely watch commercials, but darn those live hockey games), if the commercials weren't horrible.  

They have two that I'm aware of.  The First is a series of short videos of people doing things that may or may not be related to using a phone set to the tune of Party Hard by Andrew W.K..  It's mostly monotone screaming.  The Next is a bizarrely animated (Reminiscent of a Terrance and Phillip Short) drawing of people in a Winnebago paying a highway toll with Tag Team's "Whoomp! There It Is" playing.  Also awful.  I'm not sure how much worse of a commercial it would take to get me to switch away from Android as a mobile operating system, but they're certainly doing their best.