Dec. 23 - The Speed of Christmas
With Christmas rapidly approaching I decided to determine just how rapidly Christmas was approaching. To make this highly scientific and not at all made-up measurement I first considered the point of view needed. At first pass it would seem that each day moves us one day closer to Christmas and that Christmas approaches at the same speed no matter what day of the year it is. This turns out to be the totally wrong point of view and if you think that you hate children, America, and baby Jesus. Instead, we must compound the time remaining until Christmas daily, like a delightful yuletide reverse interest rate. This way each day removes an ever-increasing fraction off of the Christmas countdown. For example, as December 26th passes, it removes 1/364th of the total number of days until Christmas. Likewise, December 27th removes 1/363rd and so on until December 23rd of the next year removes 1/2 of the remaining days and Christmas Eve removes the last day (1/1 of the days remaining). Therefore, by using these fractions we can determine how fast Christmas is approaching on any given day of the year. Christmas day itself has an undefined speed of 1/0 under this system, but it's not really a problem because we're not interested in the speed something is approaching when it's actually here.
Below is a graph of the speed of Christmas normalized to 100 knots (the traditional yuletide unit of velocity) versus the days remaining until December 25th.
You can see that Christmas's approach goes as 1/x as we would expect from our definition. The last ten days before Christmas see a 90% increase in approach speed, which I think accurately reflects our general perception of holiday cheer. So today, December 23rd, Christmas is traveling at 50 knots straight for us. I hope you're ready with your canned wassail.
Posted by Nathan
