Packs of men (it is mostly men) who call themselves "cloud chasers" gather in rooms with tampered contraptions and compete to see who can generate the biggest fogs of vapour ("It's judged on girth, size, length and overall density," a vaper told reporters during the recent X Games of Vaping at New York's Henley Vaporium).
Today's big IBM contraptions are designed to run software written for their great-grandfathers, albeit much faster and more cheaply.
Thus, aircraft began as bird-like contraptions, but evolved into fish-like objects for the same fluid-dynamic reasons that caused fish to evolve the way they did.
The robots, which are little wheeled contraptions, do not need to see the bigger picture.In the case of termites, the bigger picture is provided by natural selection, which has, over the millennia, refined the rules that individual termites obey.
Early contraptions were used in factories and mines, but when cables broke they plummeted to the bottom of the shaft.
Traditional urban food carts, by contrast, have tended to be single-operator contraptions limited to selling simple items: bagels, hot dogs, pretzels.
And Hyundai cars these days are pretty good certainly not the tinny contraptions of yesteryear.Until the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 and South Korea's IMF bail-out, the family-run chaebol were useful tools of government policy.
A video of the drones in action can be seen below.The contraptions consist of a single wing about five feet (1.5 metres) long, which points skywards for takeoff and then rotates to a horizontal position as it speeds away.
Mr Updike's technical digressions as computers progress from clunky contraptions to slender laptops are more fascinating than Owen's peccadilloes though one senses that his research of both has been thorough.
The museum shows how various breakthroughs have revolutionised productivity, including contraptions that were tried but later rejected.
WHEN Subramanian Ramadorai joined Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the Indian software company he now leads, in 1972, computers were bulky and temperamental contraptions, in need of assembly, installation and constant repair.
