Redhatter’s Web Blog

Hi All… Somewhat in the spirit of this festive season, I found myself thinking about a problem last night — whilst trying to get to sleep.

We’ve all heard the stories of Santa covering the globe in a sled pulled by reindeer… Now, I’m not particularly interested in what the method of transportation is, or any other details for that matter. Rather, I was more interested in whether it was feasable, for a single individual to visit each point on the globe once in a single night.

In order to visit each point on the planet within the same “night”, one would have to exploit the phenominon of timezones. Legend has it, this mythical character does his business under the cover of night. Thus, it would be logical to assume this would be between the hours of 22:00 (10PM) and 04:00 (4AM).

The natural place to start and end such a journey would be at the International Date Line, heading westward. That is, visiting New Zealand (UTC+12), the various south pacific islands, then Australia, SE Asia..etc, scanning from pole to pole following the longitudinal lines.

Assuming this is the case, one would have to be at the international date line by 22:00, local time. The time zone west of the IDL is UTC+12. The sweep would then proceed, winding around the earth to eventually finish at the other side of the IDL at 04:00 the morning, local time (UTC-12).

Thus, we have the start and end times of our journey:

If we convert these back to UTC…

The total number of hours for the journey thus works out to be:

Thus, 360 degrees of longitude must be covered in 54 hours. Division of these figures gives us the exact length of time one can spend at any degree of longitude. It works out that an individual has 9 minutes to cover each degree of longitude. There are 180 degrees of latitude that must be covered in that 9 minutes, thus one could spend no longer than 3 seconds at any given point on the globe.

There is some optimisation that could be done to the route… for instance, you wouldn’t be delivering goods to every point on the planet, only those inhabited by people. Thus you could skip oceans and deserts, saving valuable time. The amount of optimisation though, looks limited. It would seem unlikely that a single individual could accomplish such a feat. Needless to say, it would be an interesting exercise for someone more adventurous than myself to attempt.

Anyway, not to sound like a grinch… that was my thoughts late last night. Those looking at a way to dispell the myth for youngsters who are getting a little old, this little piece could be useful.

At the moment, I’m not home, but I’m popping in occasionally to check on things (the joys of dialup mean I’m not able to remain online). I should be home tomorrow afternoon (Boxing day) and will be getting right back into the swing of things.

My thoughts especially go out to those working throughout Christmas Day. While many of us are sitting with family, eating a christmas lunch, or just veging out (like me), there are people out there who are still stuck at work. People like the firefighters in Victoria and Tasmania, who have been battling flames for much of the last few weeks. People keeping the various hospitals running. Those in law enforcement, and other facilities we all take for granted. It’s these people that deserve the day off more than most, but choose to keep working regardless. To you, I thank you.

So to all, whether you’re relaxing or hard at work, have a Merry Christmas… and let us all hope that 2007 turns out to be a better year than 2006 has been.

PS: Ohh, and those travelling interstate this year, if you happen to be wandering through the Jet Star screening points at the Brisbane Airport — keep in mind they are people too, stuck working on Christmas day… there’s no need to give them a hard time, they, like you, want to get home too.