Another scene, there's some worldwide situation I'm trying to manage, like a huge-scale disaster, challenging the world's communication system to cope. I'm explaining to someone, I think Alona, how to deal with it using redundant systems and set theory. I take them into the "fishbowl", our engineering conference room at work, where I can write on the whiteboard.

I draw three columns of numbers from 0 to about 5, but each with a different set of numbers. Some numbers appear in one column, some in more than one. And then I cross out numbers like they are failing, to demonstrate the problem, and how it will be managed by the other columns.

But then, I say, imagine that these are not numbers, but functions.