#memrdx

Why does this bastard keep knocking things off the living room table?

(The bastard in question)

I had to do a little math here.

Let's take an in-depth look at steel and feathers. Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon. Steel contains about 0.004% carbon by weight, with the rest being iron. Iron has a density of 7.874 grams per cubic centimeter. This means that for every cubic centimeter, you have about 7.87 grams of iron.

Your basic cubic centimeter is one hundredth of a liter (I'm getting a little bored of conversions here, so I'm just going to go with liters, since people who are non-metric think of volumes in liters more than in cubic centimeters anyway).

By my calculations, then, your ton of steel should have the mass of (0.004 * 1 L) * (7.87 * 10³) = about 11,205 grams, or about 24.7 ounces.

Now, feathers are actually compressed down or something? They look a lot more dense than an equal volume of air would be. I looked it up and the answer is that "a 1.0 g [gram] bird's feather can have a volume of about 0.79 mL [milliliters], with a length of around 0.3 mm and a diameter of around 0.01 mm." This makes the density of feathers about 119 g/L, which is a lot higher than air, which has a density of only about 1.29 g/L.