I've read the first two trilogies, got lost along the way after that... will have to pick them up again at some point if the third actually continues the first trilogy. It's been quite a few years though.

I enjoyed the Gap Cycle, but I'm not sure I'd re-read it.

Still not quite sure how that applies to the topic, but it has reinforced that my decision to stop reading Dune about 20 pages in was the right one :)

I have no idea what you mean by that...

Maybe partly because as soon as money is bought into the equation, people become less moral.

A lot of the reason behind developing Atom is that Sublime Text has become very popular in the last few years with people wanting something between a text editor and an IDE, however Sublime Text is not open source, has a pretty poor extension API, has basically no documentation at all, and the developer ignores 99.9% of attempts to communicate with him. This situation isn't ideal, hence the development of Atom as an open source alternative - when it gets up to spec I'll probably switch over myself.

Yes, but that unofficial page really does have almost everything on it :)

Yes, I assume you've read about the recent creation of NaCl3, NaCl7, Na3Cl2, Na2Cl, and Na3Cl at high pressures, compounds not possible in standard chemistry.

‘Impossible’ Sodium Chlorides Challenge Foundation of Chemistry

Sweet Jesus, it's true.

And he even brought up that 97% turkey.

AGW True Believers are the quintessential "Correlation != Causation" offenders.

According to this document linked to from your page world production of gold has increased by a factor of almost 7 over the last century, which is a significant increase, especially since as you say, price has not changed really at all (ignoring the large increase in the last five years, the price/ton in 1900 was the same as in 2005). This seems to indicate price is set by the demand side; also it seems to show consumption has increased by a similar factor, so more gold mined means more gold used.

The last few years however show a huge increase in price without any increase in production or usage, which does indicate to me that speculation was driving the price - the recent crash supports this.

It surprised me to be honest - here is the page I saw, and it's 1967, not 1969.This article backs up the data and discusses the gold supply in general - it does seem as though most people assume that gold mining is much less prevalent than it actually is.

Half of all of the gold in the world was mined after 1969. I wouldn't be surprised if it was similar for silver. And while that obviously hasn't affected the price massively, the supply of gold is increasing rapidly - which I would say indicates the price has nothing to do with supply or utility.

Actually according to Wikipedia the average purity of crystal is 62%, so it would be a bit short of the world's population. It would cover the adult population though :)

Not far off! According to this page the density is 1.2 g/cm3. So 200 gallons is approximately 1000kg, which is about 10 billion 100ug doses.

Yes, it's true both by absolute value and percentage, there's any number of sources available but this BBC article has a good summary of various figures.