"Not all science needs to have a purpose. The nature of humans is that, sometimes, they simply want to know. Everything else is just a bonus.

Srinivasa Ramanujan and Albert Einstein, the two scientific geniuses of the 20th century, made their earliest discoveries while working as clerks, not as professors working on taxpayer-funded projects; but why risk, in the 21st century, that some diamond might remain forever unearthed for want of a government grant?"

"I personally will miss Belgium, because like any imaginary country, they made me dream."

"As always, the question will be: What new rules and rule-setting venues emerge? Because eventually they must. The Asian Flu didn't do it, nor have any of the other more regional shocks since, but eventually you need some entities to emerge to monitor and manage these cross-border financial flows. This gap has been clear for many years, but as long as informal collusion among the largest economies has worked–just well enough–no one's been willing to surrender the power. Maybe this perturbation, then, is really the one.

That's how you need to view this global churn in a grand strategic sense: the opportunity to fill in profound rule-set gaps generated by all this rising connectivity."

"Second, mortgage originators are required to retain credit risk and to perform the servicing functions, thereby properly aligning the incentives. Third, the mortgage is funded by the issuance of standardized bonds, creating a large and liquid market. Indeed, the spread on Danish mortgage bonds is similar to the option-adjusted spread on bonds issued by the GSEs, although they carry no implicit government guarantees."

"Beyond headlines and op-eds, the organized secession movement has now been around long enough to have helped shape the basic political consciousness of young Vermonters. While their elders scoff at the idea of a free Vermont as an absurd intellectual exercise, young people have flocked to the Facebook and MySpace groups that act as clearinghouses for information on events and forums for debate."

"A hot topic, then, and one that’s not likely to go away any time soon: both Bill Kauffman and Christopher Ketcham have forthcoming books on the topic, and Sarah Palin’s tenuous ties to the Alaskan Independence Party certainly helped to get the issue in the news. Do give Cropp’s piece a read – it’s a perfect opportunity to distract your attention away from our increasingly silly election season, and to look instead at some possibilities that are considerably more exciting."