Charles C. Mann Quotes
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.
Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit.
The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.
A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.
The human propensity is to believe that flukes of good fortune will never come to an end.
The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.
The Japanese drive on the left side of the road. Most streets literally do not have names.
Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering.
Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.