SortStack #535 — 2027-11-26

By price · Order from cheapest to most expensive.

1. An average US movie theater ticket $11

   Theaters keep little of this — studios take most of the box office, which is why a bucket of popcorn can cost nearly as much as the seat.

2. A Dyson Airwrap hair styler $600

   Dyson spent about 100 million pounds developing the Airwrap, using the same tiny high-speed motor technology as its vacuums.

3. The median home in San Francisco $1.3M

   San Francisco is only about 121 square kilometers — smaller than Walt Disney World in Florida — which helps explain the brutal housing math.

4. The Louisiana Purchase, as the US paid France $15M

   The 1803 nominal price bought about 2.1 million square kilometers — roughly three cents per acre — and doubled the size of the United States overnight.

5. Building the Large Hadron Collider at CERN $4.8B

   The LHC's 27 km ring is colder than outer space — its magnets sit at 1.9 kelvin — and it briefly held a section of the emptiest vacuum in the solar system.

6. Twitter, when Elon Musk bought it $44B

   Musk tried to back out and was sued into completing the 2022 deal — he walked into headquarters carrying a sink, posting 'let that sink in.'

← All puzzles · Play today’s SortStack