OK, so I've been experimenting with Wolfram's Alpha thingy. Useful if 
you happen to want to know how long 10^15 seconds is, if you want a 
graph quickly, or if you want to look up the electrical resistence of 
silicon. Not much use for anything else.

I did find some interesting information though...

Alpha claims that the current trading price for gold is approximately 


t. (I had no idea Platinum was so expensive!)

I tried to get similar data for other substances, but Wolfram's "data 
curators" evidently haven't got that far yet. I did find a website 
though that claims that the London Metal Exchange has the following prices:

   Sn $14.325 / Kg
   Ni $13.770 / Kg
   Cu $ 4.776 / Kg
   Pd $ 1.530 / Kg
   Zn $ 1.509 / Kg
   Al $ 1.384 / Kg

(Not sure why the LME lists prices in USD, but still...)

This table is completely baffling to me. As everybody knows, Alunimium 
is about the most expensive metal you can buy (except for weird stuff 
like Titanium, or the "precious metals" like Gold or Silver), and Lead 
is about the cheapest metal there is. Except that this table says no 
such thing!! o_O

Hmm, I wonder why Iron isn't listed? A rather common metal, after all...

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