This post is part of the Overthinkery Reclamation Project, an effort to reclaim some very old posts that I wrote a long time ago. This particular post was first published on November 28th, 2013. Hence, er, the title.

Here’s something I learned today.

A pound of feathers weighs more than a pound of gold, since the weight of feathers is measured in avoirdupois pounds, which are slightly heavier than the troy pounds used to measure the weight of gold. So that’s kind of interesting.
However, you could argue the gold weighs more because Archimedes’ Force is density times the gravitational constant times volume, and the feathers would have a larger volume.
Even more however, an ounce of gold would weigh more than an ounce of feathers by about 2.75 grams since troy ounces are 12 to a troy pounds while avoirdupois ounces are 16 to the pound.
Getting into stupidly however territory, you could probably buy more feathers than gold with one pound sterling , so there’s that to consider.

So yeah, that’s what I learned today.

I am really weird.