BartlebyScrivener writes "A New York Times Op-Ed quoting Freeman and George Dyson wonders if Wall Street geeks and 'quants' outsmarted themselves with clone algorithms to create the current commercial debacle: 'Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime pledge debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with analog algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in ideational wealth. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that all of that fantastic wealth is locked up around somewhere inside the computers, and that we humans, led by the silverback males of the budgeting world, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, are frantically beseeching the monolith for answers.'" The quoted essay from George Dyson is attainable at Edge.

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