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all the sense this makes the world of:
this was emailed to everyone in RELI 246 (Church Ed: Youth and Adults) from some guy that's apparently in my class...

In case anybody is curious about the reading, I emailed Stringer…

Dear Chris,
I am going to use the reading percentage to substitute for the missed quizzes.  The total of one quiz and one reading will count a total of 10% for the course.
RCS

-----Original Message-----
From: Schwartz, Christopher J.
Sent: Sat 12/13/2003 1:21 PM
To: Stringer, Randy C.
Cc:
Subject: final

Dr. Stringer, I tried to see you in your office yesterday but when I came by Dr. Schaeffer was in.  Anyways, I had a question about the final.  When you ask what percentage of the reading we have done does our answer affect our grade?  I was reading in the syllabus and it didn’t say that we were graded on our reading.  Although it did say we were going to have 6 quizzes which I assume we would have covered the reading.  Since we only had one quiz does that still count as 10% of our grade?  Please let me know if the percentage of reading completed does affect our grade because I will we need to schedule my studying time accordingly.

Thanks,
chris

does that make any sense at all?  after much inspection and asking around, i finally figured out that what he meant was that, according to the syllabus, we were supposed to have 6 reading quizzes.  instead of 6, we had 1.  i didn't do very well on this quiz, so i needed something to make up for that grade.  anyways, Stringer thought it would be a good idea if he made a question on the final that said: "How much of the required reading have you completed?"  to this, you are supposed to answer what percentage of the reading material you actually read.  he said he would take this percentage and make that your grade for the other 5 reading quizzes.  i guess he's very trusting.  that's nice.  and, luckily, i have done most of the reading, so i can probably say something like 90% and still not be lying.  that's nice.

you know it's finals week when you see away messages like this:

powerpotatoe1: ight man, i am off to study some CONSTRUCTION SCIENCE!!
powerpotatoe1: so, peace out and word to yo momma
gstreet4life: later, du
Auto response from powerpotatoe1: Have you ever been dirty and then been like, "Whoa I have to take a shower!" and then you don't take one and you never ever take one again and you keep adding dirt to yourself on purpose sometimes and always wear the same boxers day after day and no one will talk to you cuz you stink something aweful and then you grow up to be a lonely smelly old man and never die because the dirt acts as a life perserver and stops you from aging so really you are not old at all you're just the same age you were when you decided not to take a shower but people just call you old cuz it would be weird not to?!! Well that is not going to happen to me, cuz I am totally taking a shower!!

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Miller [mailto:mikem@mcelwain.org]
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2003 4:56 PM
To: Turner, Bryan R.; Marland Hayes; Sonny Gray; Joe Arnold (E-mail); Jimbo Bass; Brian Baugus (E-mail)
Subject: Christmas Physics

The Physics of Santa and His Reindeer

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.

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 - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

Santa has 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 822.6 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 91.8 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 .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75½ 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 man-made 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.

The payload on 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 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

above) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload (not even counting the weight of the sleigh) - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each.

In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized 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.

ommmm...and now for studying....ready...go.