What's worth more, a pound of grass or a pound of peacock feathers? Or a pound of human blood?

By Cory Doctorow at 6:39 am Wednesday, Aug 27

The Evil Mad Scientist Labs folks have conducted exhaustive investigation into the value of objects relative to their weight, starting with coins and bills and working through commodities like flour, and thence to exotics like human blood and antimatter. This is extremely useful information if you're ever trying to get a lot of valuta through a narrow aperture.

People have been saying that the new industrial grade swimsuits like the LZR Racer are worth their weight in gold. As you can see, this is clearly inaccurate. But such a suit is worth its weight in marijuana or industrial diamonds.

At the high end of this graph is gold (the only thing worth exactly its own weight in gold!), right next to the cost of launching a pound of stuff to low earth orbit on the ISS. Putting that into perspective here: You might as well build your whole spaceship out of $20 bills-- it still would cost less than putting it up there. It could almost be made of solid gold for that price.

The monetary density of things