Randal Schwartz linked over to a fascinating paper (PDF) that illustrates the issues with threads. I like the same analogy randal pulled out:

To offer another analogy, suppose that we were to ask a mechanical engineer to design an internal combustion engine by starting with a pot of iron, hydrocarbon, and oxygen molecules, moving randomly according to thermal forces. The engineer’s job is to constrain these motions until the result is an internal combustion engine. Thermodynamics and chemistry tells us that this is a theoretically valid way to think about the design problem. But is it practical?

Excellent question, and the paper is worth reading.

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