A modest proposal

Wednesday 6 January 2010, 21:24

I should be allowed to set up a hidden camera at the doorstep of the Dundas West subway station in Toronto, which is across the street from the local Catholic school, and take photos up the skirts of teenage girls (or anybody else wearing a skirt) as they enter and leave the building.

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How much does a sheet of paper weigh?

Monday 29 March 2010, 15:25

A standard sheet of laser-printer paper of the usual thickness, either US "letter" size or international "A4" size, weighs 4.5 grams. That means 100 sheets weighs almost exactly one pound.

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Letter names

Wednesday 31 March 2010, 15:20

(First posted in January 2003) From time to time I want spellings for the names of the letters in the Latin alphabet. Some, like "aitch" are fairly well known; others aren't. These are not standardized, and if you look around the Web you can find multiple choices for some of them. Often, the spellings people list aren't really suitable because, for instance, they may consist of just using the letter itself (no good if the point is to disambiguate between letters that look similar). Here's a list I've compiled from several sources that meets my needs and might be helpful to you, too.

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Eight knights of the dragon

Tuesday 30 March 2010, 14:30

0 (the dragon)

And once upon a time, the villagers used to say, there was a dragon that lived at the bottom of that cave, yes the one over there.  It would steal maidens.  Of course, those days are long gone now, they said.  But things like dragons don't go away just because people stop believing, and people don't stop believing just because things like dragons have gone away.

And upon any time that a young woman would be lost, killed, or harmed in any way, the old folks would nod their heads and say wise words about the nature of dragons, and the young boys would hunt and kill the little brown lizards that hid in rock walls in that part of the country, as if those harmless creatures were to blame for looking like dragons.  It was easier than entering the cave to face the supposed dragon directly.

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