If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports.

When I was a grad student at Berkeley, my advisor, Umesh Vazirani, liked to repeat this nugget of wisdom to students, friends, and colleagues. In a single sentence, Umesh was communicating an entire philosophy of life: concentrate on the high-order bits. The squash player who runs back and forth to attempt every shot, the student who’s never late with an assignment, the researcher who stalks an unimportant problem like Captain Ahab: all have succumbed to the tyranny of the low-order bit. They need to realize that, as in a randomized algorithm, occasional failures are the inevitable bypro