trivia: size of packages.gz shrinks when sorted

[Greg Minshall]

poking around, i ran into this, in case it is of interest
----
% zcat packages.gz | grep -v '#' | gzip | wc
   1365    8020  351564
% zcat packages.gz | grep -v '#' | sort | gzip | wc
   1022    6173  284473
----
(only the last column -- bytes -- of the wc(1) output is meaningful.)

cheers.