Weekly Fallen London Questions, 01/04/2024

Idle curiosity led me to do some pondering, and it occurs to me that 35 mil is almost certainly lowballing it.

First? Because you’re converting a kitten’s mass into karats. Which would give you one kitty’s worth of diamond.

The actual measure would be a kitten-sized ice sculpture made out of solid diamond, which would 100% be denser and heavier than its meat equivalent.

(Admittedly it’s harder to find a measure of the average kitten’s volume though, so I understand the difficulty/frustration. lol)

And second? If you’re going by the Hope Diamond, which is blue? Red diamonds are apparently rarer and more expensive.

35 million is probably close to the figure that Virginia would quote you if you put it up for sale, hoping you wouldn’t look too far into it lol.

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I looked into this actually and it should be about equivalent for a diamond with that type of coloration and structure. It’s not a perfect one to one, but diamonds of that quality are much less compressed and have less carats, ironically, than their less pure counterparts.

This is true to a point, but because it’s blue it does refract pink and red light in the prism, so I think it’s close enough.

And keep in mind this is a number reverse adjusted for inflation. Today it’d probably equal something closer to 80 or 90 million echoes.

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Hard to believe that the hair/bone/muscle aggregate that composes a kitten works out to the same average weight by volume as (most) diamonds… but then again it’s also hard to believe you can literally disintegrate a diamond with a blowtorch, and you 100% can.

(If you were a married stoner with a grudge? You could literally vape your own wife’s engagement stone and exhale it in her face by way of a request for divorce.)

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Yeah it’s because the crystalline structure of diamond is very loose! It’s actually what allows for such stability and low cleavage on it, and what makes it so hard! It has one of the most ideal structures and that involves way more space than other pregious gems!

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Wow, you’ll really love stones!

Final follow-up: my Gift has indeed been pushed back to Thursday afternoon, from its previous position of Wednesday afternoons.

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The Balmoral gift is a regular living story, not a recurring scheduled thing like TtH. It always gets scheduled 7 days after you pick it up (subject to whatever server-side delays may occur).

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