Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn't get any work done. - Neal Stephenson

Shut up about Leibniz for a moment, Rudy, because look here: You — Rudy — and I are on a train, as it were, sitting in the dining car, having a nice conversation, and that train is being pulled along at a terrific clip by certain locomotives named The Bertrand Russell and Riemann and Euler and others. And our friend Lawrence is running alongside the train, trying to keep up with us — it’s not that we’re smarter than he is, necessarily, but that he’s a farmer who didn’t get a ticket. And I, Rudy, am simply reaching out through the open window here, trying to pull him onto the fucking train with us so that the three of us can have a nice little chat about mathematics without having to listen to him panting and gasping for breath the whole way.

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo — -which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.

Reader, if you don't know what a database is, rest assured that an explanation of the concept would in no way increase your enjoyment in reading this account. If you do know, you will thank me for sparing you the details.