ABSTRACT
Imagine a land called Nonods in which the people built a great many bridges. These bridges had a tendency to collapse frequently, however, killing or injuring a number of Nonods in the process. The bridges were also fairly rickety requiring lengthy training as well as many procedures to avoid falling off of them, significantly slowing traffic across the land. Now within Nonods there were many civil engineers who had amassed significant knowledge about how to build strong bridges that would not fall and that would support much more rapid traffic. However, the Nonod bridge builders generally ignored these engineering principles. “Why, we cross bridges all the time,” they said, “so we know perfectly well how to build bridges.” As a result, the Nonods continued spending a great deal of their treasure on building bridges that worked poorly, and periodically a number of Nonods were killed trying to use them. “Oh, well,” they would say. “Bridges fall down. Not much one can do about that.” Or they would say, “The people walking on them must have done something wrong to make them fall.” And thus the Nonods were quite unprepared to move their people across the land quickly when they needed to repel an invasion from the north and they were summarily defeated in battle. The Nonods were no more.
