Robots, exoskeletons and material handlers... their boundaries are pretty obscure and hard to define neatly and precisely. So how can you describe the leggy walker that can carry a compact load (goods and men)?

WL-16RIII coming down the stairs carefully with full load.

The walker, I won't call it a robot definitely, stands 128cm tall and weighs 76Kg. Power source comes from NiMH battery. Not from some fancy nuclear cell.

Each leg is supported by six cylindrical plungers that are parallel-linked. The platform can support the load which almost equals to the self weight. Each stride, around 30cm wide, needs 1 second to finish, rather sluggish yet. I decided to call it, therefore, the Mighty Toddler.
Takanishi Lab of Waseda University, Tokyo, and tmsuk co. (pronounced [temuzak]) of Kita-Kyushu, a robotics venture, collaborated to produce the prototype walker WL-16RIII.
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For some unknown reason, one file-sharing software, Winny, dominates in Japan. The P2P Winny was written and shared for free (of course, this is file-sharing ware!) by Kaneko Isamu-san, then a research assistant at the University of Tokyo.

Winny received instant fame for its user-friendliness and efficiency, and immediately exterminated all other P2P file sharers from the Japanese digital scene. Winny has been constantly polished up and streamlined through hundreds of updates by the author and his supporters.

Kaneko-san reporting to his supporters how everybody in the police loves to share good (or bad) files with Winny.

Its popularity has been getting so vast that at any time more than half a million Winny nodes are active on the Web and ready for sharing/downloading everything you can imagine. And imagine the Net traffic, too.
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Sudoku (pronunciation [su:doku], the first syllable has a long vowel) is one puzzle you don't need any instructions at all. A glance and 2 seconds flat are enough. Now you fully understand this brain twister. Go ahead, tackle it with a pen.

Origin of this logic puzzle goes back to 1984. A Tokyo puzzle publisher, Kaji Maki-san, had found a neat number puzzle in an American puzzle magazine called "Number Place". He picked it up, and gave it a bit of polish. And a suitable handle, too.

Nikoli's Kaji-san, the godfather of Sudoku, promoting his puzzle magazines.

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Yield from gold mine is pretty flimsy. The best gold mines, generally hydrothermal deposit mine, give around 50g to 80g of gold from 1ton of ore. If you declared you had extracted 200g to 300g of pure gold from a ton of ore, everybody would call you a megalomaniac Munchausen. This miracle occurs daily, though. Sure, in the junkyard where all those discarded mobile phones are piled up.

Hundreds of IC chips hidden in a mobile phone contain a minuscule amount of gold in their plastic package, in the shape of internal bonding wires. This gold can be extracted quite easily (well, compared to the traditional gold mines where thousands of emanciated mine slaves toiled), and is much appreciated by the mobile shop folks as a windfall.

Gold ore ready for shipping to gold smelter.

The only problem is to collect enough discarded mobile phones.
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Everybody knows Akihabara is the dead center of the world, and all the fun, gadgets and electrons implode daily along its narrow streets. Pious pilgrims from every corner of the world eagerly jump into this maelstrom to sacrifice themselves... er, their wallets rather.

Just adjacent to Akiba, only a little bit westward, lies another huge blackhole which robs a different group of pilgrims of their wallet to the last penny. There, Kanda Jinbou-cho area is densely packed with hundreds of bookshops, both new and secondhand. Yes, it features the biggest concentration of book traders in the world.
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