Many anthropologists work with a concept called embodied knowledge - tacit, nonscientific knowledge - and look for ways to incorporate such information into product design.

The story of the Web starts in 1980, when Berners-Lee, a young consulting physicist at the CERN physics laboratory near Geneva, grew frustrated with existing methods for finding and transferring information.

Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company - almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.

Tim Berners-Lee, the 44-year-old English physicist who created the World Wide Web, is precisely the kind of hero that a relatively simple invention with profound social and economic consequences should lay claim to. He is not just creative but democratic, diplomatic, polite and generous with credit and praise.

Like the protagonist of her 2006 novel, 'Love and Other Impossible Pursuits,' Ayelet Waldman is a Jewish redhead who attended Harvard Law School and is madly in love with her husband. But the obvious similarities end there.

Unlike most divorced parents, whose interactions are confined to the topic of the kids, people still sharing a house have to talk about clogged sinks and moth infestations.