Compared with the elegant inventions of the theorists, nature's code seemed a bit of a kludge. - Brian Hayes

It's all done with gears. Also pinions, snails, arbors; pawls and ratchets; and cam followers; cables, levers, bell cranks, and pivots.

The whirling gears of progress have put the gear makers out of work.

The integers, the rationals, and the irrationals, taken together, make up the continuum of real numbers. It's called a continuum because the numbers are packed together along the real number line with no empty spaces between them.