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

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.

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

The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.

Historically, large-scale global trade has served two functions: 1) the exchange of goods between willing sellers and buyers described in Econ 101 textbooks; 2) as a tool of state aggrandizement, in which the private parties are stand-ins for governmental interests.

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