Were insects evolving into ever tinier creatures?
The Intel researchers said they had been faced with another challenge besides building ever tinier chips.
What was once always on the brink of something bigger has become Balkanized, and the process of genre subdivision has hidden away bands in ever tinier and more obscure pigeonholes, affecting even the best and most widely known among them.
Largely devoid of the battalions of organised labour that once provided its organisational and electoral muscle, it has become a shadow party run by an ever tinier clique of politicians drawn from ever narrower backgrounds.
But while the high street takes a step closer to Ann Summers territory by passing off ever tinier scraps of material as clothing, Summers takes a step closer to "respectability" this week by acquiring the high-street lingerie chain Knickerbox.
But researchers are steadily shrinking once-massive machines, fabricating blades, hinges and other parts out of silicon at an ever tinier scale to create systems the size of a grain of sand or a red blood cell.
For decades, the power of computers has grown at a staggering rate as designers have managed to squeeze ever more and ever tinier transistors onto a silicon chip — doubling the number every two years, on average, and leading the way to increasingly powerful and inexpensive personal computers, laptops and smartphones.
Morgan devotes the last part of his book to a feverish gallop through events since McCarthy: the F.B.I.'s ever more frantic pursuit of an ever tinier Communist Party, the sex lives of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the birth of the New Left, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-contra, whatever.
While it's one thing to stick it to white privilege and remind the mainstream that not everything is made for and about white people, it's quite another to cordon off culture into ever tinier boxes, where the right to enjoy and be influenced by what you consume is narrow and prescriptive.
"The A&P, once enormously successful and still the largest chain of food stores, has responded to tough competition and ever tinier profit margins by setting out on a suicidal spree of price-cutting and overhead-adding that increased volume while incurring even huger losses.
