If you're going to be a pedant you need to be an accurate pedant. smoyer didn't say "a much better conductor", just "a better conductor", and as you say yourself, gold is 9% better.
Sorry, meant to earlier - I find the calendrical significance fascinating. It's almost a form of proto-writing in some ways (in the sense that it encodes knowledge in a material yet non-illustrative form) but I love the fact that it does so while also being, well, a hat. I also enjoy the potential connections to other Bronze Age oddities like the Trondheim Sun Chariot and the Nebra Sky Disk:
But if I had to be totally honest, I found this while researching the history of wizard hats and that's what I like the most about it. Granted, there's almost certainly no link there, but it's fun to imagine a scenario whereby Bronze Age proto-druid ceremonial headgear leads to Gandalf's hat.
You mention a golden hat, and people respond with:
- Tinfoil hat
- Wizard hat
- Blackhat/whitehat hackers
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
That looks like a nice cross-section of HN readers' typical interests. You could probably make some interesting demographic observations on the basis of this data.
P.S. Am I the only one who immediately thought of the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland?
Apple announces iHat; people begin queuing at stores. Reddit tips its e-fedora, which is actually an e-trilby. Maker community angrily notes that the oldest surviving combination stealth television remote and infrared camera-blinder hat is now nearly 20 years old. Popehat.com reminds everyone that it is actually a law blog. Several geeks go off on their own to make their own rabbit fur felt, only better, because they're going to use Haskell instead of C.
Actual milliners gape in astonishment as a SV startup selling nothing but virtual digital hats is acquired for $350 million.
Then the tech industry catches sight of another shiny object.
This Wikipedia article reads like it's a passage from a Harry Potter fanfic written by an archaeology nerd, describing the Sorting Hat at the wizarding school for rich kids who couldn't get into Hogwarts because they were too pretentious...
