When Jonathan Swift described the episode of Laputa in his Gulliver's Travels his genius for satire took on a prophetic dimension. The Laputans were a strange race of men — a star-gazing, introspective people who decorated their clothing with emblems of the sun, moon, stars, and various musical instruments and served their food in fancy geometrical patterns. They devoted their time to the study of mathematics, astronomy and other subjects devoid of concrete claims and when in public were always accompanied by “flappers” to call them back from the far reaches of abstraction and impracticality. Swift employed great imagination and rich wealth of detail in heaping contempt upon the abstract mind.