One of the many spams recieved today was titled:
easily, enough I am HARI SELDON and his eyes all.
Hari Seldon was a character in Issac Assimov’s Foundation series. So, we now know that the spammer can read, perhaps his writing skills will improve with practice.
How much do books weight?
Why would you want to know?
Well, at work (www.rootskitchens.co.uk) we are frequently asked to supply book shelves. Remembering that every book is different, a typical selection of cookery books (at least, the selection I had to hand at the shop) weighed a total of 2.25Kg and occupied 100mm when standing on edge. Therefore, 1 metre of books would weigh 22.5Kg and our shelves and (when rounding) brackets would need to support a minimum of 25Kg/m.
Remember though, that’s a minimum because:
Shelf brackets (decent ones anyway) will state how much weight they have been tested to safely hold. This is normally given as an evenly placed load around the mid point of the bracket. For example, if a given bracket will support 20Kg and is 300mm long, the 20Kg is taken as acting from the middle – 150mm away from the wall. Therefore if you put all of your 20Kg weight at the far edge, 300mm away from the wall you can expect the bracket to fail.
Also be aware that some brackets give Safe Working Load when used as a pair, whilst others will be based on each individual bracket. Remember your shelf also has a weight and you may need to take this into account.
As a rule of thumb, if a customer says they would like to use a shelf for books I would look to find brackets that would support a minimum of 35Kg/m for a shelf 300mm deep. Therefore a 500mm long shelf would need to be able to hold 17.5Kg, and so on.
The other thing worth thinking about is bookends – some of those can be heavier than the books! Perhaps you can find some that can be permanently fixed to stop books falling off.
Did you know it’s been almost two years since I created this site? Well, it has. About a year ago I revealed some of my top secret* page view statistics. Then the monthly page view totals looked like this:
Month: Pages Viewed
Nov 2005: 1599
Oct 2005: 1180
Sep 2005: 676
Compare and contrast the following then:
Week: Pages Viewed
17/Sep/06 1989
10/Sep/06 2053
3/Sep/06 1929
Yes, you read it correctly. There are now more visitors each week than in a whole month from last year. Another example from the logs is that 821 “Distinct Hosts Served” during the last week – say hello in the comments everyone! (see this entry for more detail about what web site stats mean).
What are you all coming here for? Well, according to the search logs – most of you are still looking for this entry although flavour of the month is Steve Irwin – he got a mention in our holiday photos. For those who don’t know, Steve Irwin became famous from his TV programmes on wildlife (he became known as “The Crocodile Hunter”). He had a Zoo near Brisbane but was killed recently by a Sting Ray while filming a new series.
The question you’re probably all desperate to hear the answer too is “How much have you earn’t from the Google Ads?” (written about here). Well, it’s safe to say that I haven’t even reached two significant figures. That’s another way of saying less than US$10.
*OK, they’re not that secret it’s just I don’t process the log file often.