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Kookaburra coins: Don't be fooled!

I was pricing Australian silver Kookaburra coins on eBay recently, and I noticed something disturbing though not entirely unexpected:  an awful lot of people are selling the bullion issue under a claim that it's the proof issue.  My guess is that most of these people are misinformed rather than dishonest, but either way, buyers should beware.  Many Web pages about these coins are confusing, outdated, and/or horribly designed, so I'm going to collect some information about them here for my own reference and anyone else's who may care. (28 April 2006)

How much does a sheet of paper weigh?

About 4.5 grams.  So if you're mailing a letter that can be at most 50 grams, you should be able to include about 10 sheets of paper plus the envelope.  Of course, the real answer depends on many variables.  Explanation below. (14 February 2006)

Names of the letters of the alphabet

Most of us seldom have occasion to need them, but every so often, it becomes necessary to write down the actual names of letters of the alphabet as opposed to the letters themselves.  For instance, what do you write if you're marking up a manuscript for technical publishing and you want to indicate that a given symbol is the numeral 0 as opposed to the letter O? Well, you can circle it and say "this is a zero".  But what is the word for the letter?  We have words for all the numerals; for the letters of the Greek alphabet ("alpha", "beta", "gamma", and so on); for pretty much all the other characters in ASCII; what about the Latin alphabet as used in English?  (English actually has a couple letters Latin doesn't, but I'm pretty sure it's still called the "Latin" alphabet.) (6 January 2003)