A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.

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.

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

A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.

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.

A smartphone links patients' bodies and doctors' computers, which in turn are connected to the Internet, which in turn is connected to any smartphone anywhere. The new devices could put the management of an individual's internal organs in the hands of every hacker, online scammer, and digital vandal on Earth.