This week Adrian Newey, the boffin behind Red Bull's 2010 Formula One championship winning car said: "I am the only dinosaur left in the pit lane who is still using a drawing board".
He does not look like a computer boffin, nor does he speak in the manner of a tortured ideologue.
Mr Newey was the brilliant boffin behind a long succession of wins by the Williams team in the early 1990s, but had not recently won with McLaren.
It is not just that a Chinese boffin in Beijing reads papers written by Chinese boffins in America.
Talk to a boffin at DaimlerChrysler or Continental, a big automotive supplier, and he will tell you proudly of the ever-increasing sophistication of cars' electronics: sensors that read the road-surface; adaptive cruise control, which responds to other cars; vehicle-to-vehicle internet communication, and more.
His 27-page report has plenty of caveats: Sai Thein Win is a missile expert, not a nuclear boffin, and some of what he reports is hearsay; some drawings are crude at best; some equipment seen in pictures could at a pinch have civilian uses too.
Sometimes, it is simply about boldly going where no boffin had gone before.
But thanks to a boffin from Bell Labs in New Jersey, plus the rise of the microprocessor and some engineers in San Diego who wouldn't take no for an answer, code-division multiple access (CDMA) technology is now conquering the wireless world.
The February 7th unveiling of the technical specifications for IBM's "Cell" chip, developed in conjunction with Sony and another Japanese electronics giant, Toshiba, shows that the claims of Sony's leading boffin may not be misplaced.
Balachander Krishnamurthy, a boffin at AT&T Labs, the research arm of the phone company, proposes a system in which ISPs would establish a consortium similar to banks creating Visa that would act as a clearing house.
One television commercial features a buff faux boffin strolling around a virtual lab, waxing eloquent about their promise for greener energy.
