Reporting by XinZhiyuan
Edit: LRS is so sleepy
Christmas is coming, and Santa Claus is about to start delivering gifts from house to house in a reindeer sleigh. To let children know how long Santa Claus will have to deliver gifts to themselves, Google and NORTHA will begin tracking the real-time location of the "courier" on Christmas Eve.
Christmas is coming, and children are waiting for an old man with a red hat and a white beard to stuff a gift in his socks.
Every Christmas, the "Christmas Gift Courier" leaves the snow and ice of Finland on time, sits in his sleigh and directs the reindeer to circle the world, dropping gifts in the chimneys of every house.
However, the process of waiting for Christmas gifts to be delivered is very painful, and children often ask "Where is Santa Claus?"
So Google installed a GPS on Santa's sleigh, and children only need to visit the website or app of the Tracker Santa Tracker to get the location of the courier in real time.
In fact, since 2004, Google will open the website every year on Christmas Eve, in addition to tracking Santa Claus, there are many interesting games on the website, you can also learn about Christmas.
Santa Claus travels from the North Pole all the way south to Antarctica, where he then travels through the rest of the continents to give a gift to the children everywhere.
In addition, in addition to displaying the real-time location on the Santa Claus tracking website, it will also display the distance and arrival time of Santa Claus and the children.
Originally inspired by showmanship?
In 2004, Google acquired a map development team, and the members of this team had been thinking about a question: How to put Santa's sleigh location on the map?
In fact, the completion of each project is not as simple as it seems at the beginning.
Developing a good Santa Tracker requires a lot of modifications to the original program, and the advantage is that the entire R&D team can improve the technology during the R&D process.
According to Dave, a longtime Google employee, they've been thinking about how to build, publish, and improve the Santa Tracker's access experience, such as improving the design of the web interface or developing some optimization tools.
Because this project is also very interesting, they are also very motivated to develop, and they have been striving for excellence to make the children live a happier Christmas.
During development, they also learned new technologies in courses within Google, developing an app for santa trackers.
The Santa Claus Tracker project is also growing, after 17 years of development, from the initial internal core team responsible for development, to now almost 20 people and some volunteers to develop together, has developed into a big project.
In the two years since the epidemic swept the world, Santa Claus has also begun to wear a mask on his travels.
Game address: https://santatracker.google.com
Santa Claus also lies in bed
Since it is not yet Christmas Eve, the GPS installed by Google has not yet taken effect, but from the small animation provided on the website, you can see that Santa Claus is preparing.
Reindeer and little penguins pull Santa Claus out of the warm bed (once a year, they work the bed).
Take a shower, have breakfast, and then... Break the buttons of your clothes again?
Of course, there are many more mini-games.
For example, use the mouse to control the villain to run around collecting gifts, have a snowball fight, and then a wave of operations is taken away.
There are also sandbox mini-games, or the kind with a physics engine! Short for "building a simulator"?
It feels like a day has passed.
In addition, there are some interesting videos.
For example, remind you to set the password more complicated to be safe.
As a programmer manufacturer, the small games provided by the website are of course indispensable to "programming" (Christmas also let children write code, too cruel).
Xiaobian saw this "coding hot dance" at a glance, and it was very exciting to see, ready to try (learn).
this.... There is indeed the taste of No Code.
Well, it seems that Google is not a cruel company, so children can still play with confidence at Christmas!
Escort Santa Claus
In addition to Google, the North American Aerospace Defense Command also opens a website every year, NORAD Tracks Santa, to track Santa's location.
NORAD tracks Santa Claus longer than Google, and for more than six decades NORTHA command has been touting how they use powerful military tracking systems to track Santa Claus.
As for why Santa Claus is "air control", it is necessary to start with a misunderstanding.
In 1955, Sears Roebuck & Co., a Colorado-based Springs company, ran an advertisement in a newspaper encouraging children to call Santa Claus on a special phone number.
However, the hotline phone number given in the advertisement was printed incorrectly, and all the calls that were supposed to be made to "Santa Claus" were transferred to the command center hotline of the North American Continental Air Defense Command (the predecessor of the North American Air Defense Command).
At that time, Colonel Harry Shoup received his first phone call on Christmas Eve, in which a 6-year-old boy spoke of his Christmas wishes.
Kids: Are you Santa Claus's helper?
Colonel Shoup (pause): I'm not a helper, I'm Santa Claus.
Colonel Shoup later received a second phone call, and after asking the child's mother about the situation, he finally understood the reason for the matter, so he ordered that all staff must provide the children who called in santa's current location.
Since then, the North American Continental Air Defense Command has taken on a new business, tracking Santa Claus!
Of course, the reality may not be as beautiful as depicted in the story.
The Atlantic quoted Gizmodo as digging up one of the earliest reports of the history to date: On November 30, 1955, a child called CONAD because he accidentally reversed two numbers in his phone number.
When the children asked Colonel Shoup if there was a Santa Claus in the North Pole, Colonel Shoup replied: There may be a person named Santa Claus in the Arctic, but we don't pay attention to people from the Arctic.
At that time, the United States and the Soviet Union were in the middle of the Cold War, CONAD was responsible for the close monitoring of the Soviet Union, the atmosphere was very tense, so Colonel Shoup was also in a state of tension at all times, and did not give a perfect enough answer to the children's fantasies.
In the years after the story, the version was constantly revised until it turned into a fairy tale.
Colonel Shoup issued an announcement saying that CONAD, army, navy and naval aviation will continue to track Santa Claus and escort his journey to the United States from attacks by those who do not believe in Christmas.
In 1958, the United States and Canada merged their air defense military agencies into NORAD, but this tradition remains.
Command, with the help of volunteers, reported Santa's latest location to the children who made calls on Christmas Eve and the mainstream media.
Many of the military and family members and friends stationed at Cheyenne Hill and Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado are mostly volunteers who spend Christmas Eve together at the headquarters' Santa Claus Tracking Center, maintaining a fairytale world each year for thousands of children who make phone calls.
In 1997, Canadian military Major Jamie Robertson set up the "NORAD Track Santa Claus" website, from which children around the world can get the "latest location" of Santa Claus in real time on Christmas Eve.
In 2004, NORAD received 35,000 emails, 55,000 phone calls, and 912 million website visits from 181 countries.
In 2006, the command received 500,000 calls from 210 regions.
To protect Santa Claus's safety in U.S. territory, NORAD uses military satellites and radar systems to track Santa's whereabouts, using jet fighter jets to escort Santa Claus, and if Santa's accident occurs, the fighter can be lifted into the air within minutes.
And NORAD also has a special Santa Claus camera, placed in famous landmarks around the world to observe Santa's movements.
Of course, these military equipment may be another style of painting for China's small partners.
Resources:
https://blog.google/inside-google/googlers/googlers-santa-tracker-team/
https://weibo.com/ttarticle/p/show?id=2309351000144056518700983911
https://www.ifanr.com/1142475
https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/32338328
Game Address:
https://santatracker.google.com