He says the next year or so will be about closing posts like Rahman Khel, figuring out where the Afghans are strong enough to take control on their own and where they still need help.
John Kendrew's work to solve the structure of myoglobin, a handy oxygen store found in muscle cells, was in fact a more impressive scientific feat that figuring out DNA (no mean achievement in itself).
It indulges his love of figuring things out, plus it identifies him as a detail-oriented aesthete compared to the likes of David Cameron, forever rubbing his greasy thumbs across his screen as he hamfistedly attempts to beat his own meagre Fruit Ninja highscore.
That challenge is figuring out what information we must deliberately omit from our results, following a ruling from the European Union's court of justice.
Besides figuring out how to make Evernote more accessible, the company has been working hard on making it faster to use – Libin admits the product had become "sluggish" – but also thinking carefully about how people work, and how Evernote might need to evolve in response.
His brakes had failed and he was heading for a wall: "The only thing I can remember is knowing I was going to hit the wall and just pretty well figuring that was the end of my life and just wondering if I was going to feel it".
It is also at the edge of south-east Asia, and figuring out if it is British, continental – there are large heritage communities from Italy, Greece, the Balkans and Turkey – or Asian.
In the end, thoughtfully, he must have decided to do it just after Manly's opening round defeat of Parramatta, figuring he could slip in his "It's not you, it's me" monologue amid their celebrations, thus mitigating Manly's hurt.
The only hard part was figuring out what to listen to.
"It would have to be worked out between the various state programs, in figuring out how they are going to do more with less money," he said.
Figuring it out was not easy.
