Child Brainpower

A student at Dorseyville Middle School near Pittsburgh, 14-year-old Suvir Mirchandani, noticed that he was getting a lot more printed handouts in class than he used to in elementary school. He wondered how wasteful it was, and then discovered just how expensive ink is. At up to $75 an ounce, he points out; it's twice as expensive as Chanel No. 5 perfume. What he did about this discovery was described in mashable.com:

"Using software called APFill Ink Coverage, he calculated how much ink was used in four representative fonts — Century Gothic, Comic Sans, Garamond and the default choice of most word processors, Times New Roman. The ink-preserving winner: Garamond.

"Changing Times New Roman to Garamond on all handouts, Mirchandani calculated, would save his school district $21,000 a year. But he didn't stop there. Encouraged by teachers, he applied his calculations to the U.S. government's ink budget, which runs to $467 million a year.  In a paper published in the Journal for Emerging Investigators, Mirchandani lays out how switching to Garamond would save the government $136 million a year on ink alone."

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