Japanese Nostalgic Car

First it was the wakaba mark (also called shoshinsha mark), the green and yellow symbol that new drivers in Japan are required to display on their vehicles for one year. Wakaba marks gained popularity in the US when JDM scenesters began to plaster their cars with them in ironic fashion. Of course since we’re dealing with nostalgics, we opted for the kareha mark (also called fukushi mark), the counterpart for elderly drivers, for our logo and car. In case you hadn’t guessed, the color and shape of the marks represent a spring leaf and autumn leaf.

The four-leaf clover, so frequently seen on St. Paddy’s day, is part of a lesser known yotsuba (or shintai shougai) mark for handicapped drivers. It’s only been around since 2001 and it’s optional. Yeah, it’s not green, but hey, it’s hard to find the luck o’ the Irish in Japan.

Ever since the first warehouse-sized IBMs appeared on the scene, the unattainable holy grail of computer science has always been a man-made machine that mimics the complexity of the human brain. Well, scientists at Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science at Tsukuba, which is sadly unaffiliated with Tsukuba Circuit, have discovered the secret. And as it turns out, the answer is “like a small car,” says researcher Anirban Bandyopadhyay.

This new brain-like computer is only the size of 17 molecules, yet can perform 1000 times the calculations of a modern transistor. We won’t even begin to pretend that we understand the rest of this article, and quite frankly, we don’t even see how this blob of molecules resembles a vehicle, but we’ll take the scientists’ word for it. Dang, we always knew that small cars from Japan held the keys to the human mind!

[LiveScience]