Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering.

Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering.

Scientists have established huge numbers of links between particular diseases and snippets of DNA, but in the great majority of cases, this has not yet been translated into treatments that can help cure patients. These treatments will come - tomorrow, or the day after.

Major power and telephone grids have long been controlled by computer networks, but now similar systems are embedded in such mundane objects as electric meters, alarm clocks, home refrigerators and thermostats, video cameras, bathroom scales, and Christmas-tree lights - all of which are, or soon will be, accessible remotely.

The Japanese drive on the left side of the road. Most streets literally do not have names.

A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on - came to Europe via the Silk Road.

The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.