Wednesday 23 December 2015

Santa Claus Part II

Today/night I want to just briefly touch on "the problem" and tomorrow  "suggest" possible solutions as exercises left to the student, Q.E.D., etc.

Let us first remind ourselves of the story and why:


                         Bill carved this - another Bill photographed it. They have yet to meet.


The Santa problem is why were these explanations ever given - flying reindeer seem the most ludicrous inventions. It seems that the assumptions made yesterday are adult explanations to inquiring children with threats being made to behave.

Once I was a child and spake as a child and now I am adult and have to explain Santa to Kim and Rory.
Well first of all let us introduce a red herring: Arthur C Clarke's 3rd law:
"Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
I am assuming that Santa belongs to the advanced civilization and we do not. As evidence I submit that with the technology available to neolithic people of Europe we today could not build Stonhenge or the Pyramids. In fact one explanation often prayed for is the Alien one - they did it, we could not.

And so today we might say: ah ha!
"Whichever means are used to deliver presents to billions of homes during the festive season, it’s clear that
Father Christmas&Santa Claus is way more technologically advanced than us."

Now we are getting somewhere!

Tomorrow I shall present some exercises for the interested "good" student to begin to understand Santa and possibly come up with a way of distributing refugees to deserving people. I will try to reduce the number of assumptions.

W O B

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