We've all seen those old medieval world maps that tried to accurately represent the world as it was then known. At the edges of these maps, where knowledge and exploration petered out, imagination and fear took over. In a large, cautionary hand, the cartographers would scrawl over these mysterious regions the ominous warning, "There be dragons!"

Like medieval map-makers, most of us as children also instinctively feared that which was just out of our sight, just beyond our scrutiny. Has anyone seen Disney and Pixar's movie, Monsters, Inc.? It plays beautifully on this age-old fear factor. Monsters, Inc. is a movie about all those monsters that live behind every child's closet door.

In this postmodern version, of course, the monsters use an efficient key-card system which, when electronica…