I’ve spent my life trying to build elegant tools to solve hard problems. Now I am old and tired and somehow I find myself in a world of mud where the only tool is a club with nails hammered into it, used by swinging it wildly about, spattering the ground with fragments of skull and brain of friend and enemy alike. The nails, formerly rusted iron, are now stainless steel scavenged from a vast, broken needle made of strange metals: no-one now remembers it was once a spacecraft. This is the sum of...