A gigantic contraption, it had a warning stencilled on its side: "For Official Use Only".
The standard model is something of a stick-and-bubble-gum contraption: it clumsily joins very dissimilar kinds of interactions, and its equations contain about twenty arbitrary-seeming numbers — corresponding to the masses of the various particles, the ratios of the force strengths, and so on — that had to be experimentally measured and put in "by hand".
The computerized system is considered far less fragile than the 1930s-era lever-and-pulley contraptitn it will replace.
To give you an idea, a normal veal stock would need six hours of simmering time and with this brilliant contraption, it now takes just three hours.
What came next was the closing tune, "Blue Monk," delivered more as a boilerplate blues than as the Monkish contraption it could be.
Those tiny figures bouncing around on that floating contraption — it looks like a mobile suspended from a child's bedroom ceiling — are people.
Instead, NASA hopes to deposit it on Mars using a contraption it has dubbed a skycrane.As with the other rovers, Curiosity's mother ship will rely on heat shields and air-resistance, and then on a parachute, to slow its arrival.
Over the last few years, at the kinds of conferences where the world's technological elite gathers to mainline caffeine and determine the course of history, Google has entertained the crowds with a contraption it calls Liquid Galaxy.
Involving lots of brandy and a special silver contraption, it is one of those gastronomic rituals that could originate only in France (like breathing the condensed fumes of a cooked songbird from under a napkin – a delicacy that's now illegal – as François Mitterand did on his deathbed).
People in Detroit like Henry Ford, who was the most famous but there are others, said there's a middle-class market for this contraption, it's not just the plaything of the wealthy".
The New York Times quoted another bomb guy who referred to the device dismissively as "a Rube Goldberg contraption" — "It's the 'swing-the-arm-with-the-shoe-that-hits-the-ball-and-knocks-over-a-stick-that-knocks-something-off-a-shelf,' and it is all supposed to work".
