Japan Facts via Wolfram|Alpha
Here are some cool searches that I ran while playing with the new Wolfram|Alpha “computational knowledge engine” – I’m trying to learn the ropes so that I can make use of this cool new tool. If you’re not heard about it yet, I recommend watching the screencast demo on the site. If you have heard of it, or perhaps in spite of what you may have heard about it, it’s really not a search engine and it’s really not competing with Google, no matter what the news media says. Lots of crap reporters out there. They didn’t even read the first answer in the FAQ. Big differences all around. The biggest is obviously that W|A never links you to another site. You input a query and it does its best to crunch relevant factual information and display it on a results page for you. In short, it’s more like a fact calculator than it is like a search engine. (Hence the term “computational knowledge engine.”) 
Anyhoo – here are some Japan-related queries that I tried. And I’m just scratching the surface here.
You can even compare a classic Japanese pentatonic musical scale with the pentatonic used in the opening of the Temptations’ My Girl. (Had to do my homework for that one, if I’m honest.) Ha ha. Can you think of any cool searches to do while you’re learning how the system works? I’m having fun as I work my way up to more complex queries. (I’m currently trying to get it to rank or compare ratios of male and female population demographics for multiple countries, but it might be too much for it to handle in these early stages. Sure, it can handle hard math, but not silly math. Ha ha.) Try a search out in this widget and post in the comments if you want to share your thoughts or if you turn up anything cool. 
Last note – one of the coolest features to me is the ability to see what sources were used in generating my results and to save them as a PDF. That rules. (Haven’t tried the Mathematica Live file yet, but I hear it’s pretty nifty too.)
