Need/want cheap terabytes? Backblaze details how they put together 67-terabyte mass storage units for $7,867 each, or $117,000 per petabyte. This is what I like to see: do it yourself, shade tree engineering. Damned skippy!
The trouble with economics. Caveats aplenty.
Religion. The divine misogyny.
Fareed Zakaria suggests greed is good, sort of.
What do the Russians really want?
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Mass linkage? Many of your posts are very high quality but so eclectic as to be difficult to comment on. Dead mining towns are interesting, but what were the actual economies and social structures???
Hi Honig, dead mining towns are … dead. I visit these places for reasons other than the understanding of their social history. My interest is more concerned with how it comes about that we can find concentrations of chemical elements. The junk that is leftover on the surface or underground is of secondary importance to me.
I publish my photos in the blog only because they may be interesting to look at. What is of interest to me is that there exist veins of metal compounds that have somehow accumulated in a particular area. Nature is able to concentrate certain substances to a level where the economies of scale allow for their extraction.
The milling process used in gold extraction is also very interesting. Without mercury, 19th and early 20th century gold extraction would have been limited to placer mining of nuggets and dust. Amalgamation, chlorination, and/or cyanidation are all quite necessary for large scale gold mining to be feasible. Cyanidation is still in use and enjoys some credibility in the US. Amalgamation is in use in the Amazon and in Africa where miners are exposed to large amounts of mercury vapor.
It has been said that for every oz of gold that came out of the old mining districts, 10 oz of mercury were used to perform the isolation. Quite a large amount of process Hg came from the cinnabar mines of California.
Google Maps based traveling sales problem solver:
http://gebweb.net/optimap/