Communications

This part happens all the time: A construction crew putting up an office building in the heart of congested Tysons Corner in McLean, Va., hit a fiber-optic cable no one knew was there. This part doesn't: Within moments, three black SUVs drove up, half a dozen men in suits jumped out, and one said, "You just hit our line." Whose line, you may ask? The guys in suits didn't say, recalled Aaron Georgelas, whose company, the Georgelas Group, was developing the Greensboro Corporate Center.

What's the proper conversation starter when greeting an alien? How about, "This is Earth speaking. We would like to know you. Please reply." Less graciously but perhaps more honestly, you might offer, "Down here we are all confused." And by the way, if you do come for a visit, please "don't kidnap us and poke us. We hate that." These are all authentic, if occasionally crack-brained, suggestions for how we might go about opening a dialogue with an alien civilization.

To understand how the wizards of Twitter settled on 140 as the magic number of characters in a single tweet, you have to go back two decades to Bonn, Germany. One day in 1985, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at the typewriter in his home there, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, the communications researcher counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. The blurbs nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.

When a close friend went in for exploratory surgery recently, her doctor told her there was nothing to worry about. In fact, he was so unconcerned, he planned to perform the surgery laparoscopically -- that is, with only minor openings. But during the surgery, he found cancer. By the time the operation was over, he had abandoned the original approach in favor of a much larger incision, removing her uterus and ovaries as well.

President-elect Barack Obama is expected to name the nation's first-ever federal chief technology officer sometime soon. According to Obama's website, the CTO's role will be to "ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century." It's not surprising that Obama plans a major emphasis on technology.

During 45 years of military rule, Myanmar's generals drilled fear and suspicion so deeply into the minds of their people that when their opponents tried to harness the rage seething on the streets last fall, no one knew whom to trust. The generals quickly took advantage, crushing the pro-democracy demonstrations, killing at least 15 people and jailing thousands. It was a brutally simple strategy that had worked before. But this time may be different.

When Ryan Kuder lost his job last week, everyone knew it. That's because he chronicled the experience of his last hours at Yahoo Inc. through a stream of electronic dispatches laced with gallows humor.

"I'm going to kill people in Akihabara. I'm going to crash into a crowd of people and when the car is down I'll use a knife. Goodbye everyone." -- Text message believed to have been posted on the Web by Tomohiro Kato at 5:21 a.m. the day seven people were slain in Tokyo's Akihabara district.

It happened with cigarettes. It happened with red meat. And carbs. And SUVs. And now it's happening with e-mail. The preferred communication channel of millions of Americans is no longer cool. According to a growing number of academics, "technologists" and psychologists, our dependence on e-mail -- the need to attend to a constantly beeping in-box -- is creating anxiety in the workplace, adversely affecting the ability to focus, diminishing productivity and threatening family bonds.

Choosing the best cellphone for foreign travel can be daunting. Is the iPhone the answer? Which BlackBerry -- Bold or Storm? Reliable phones that can be used overseas start at about $80. But beware the add-ons. Also, be sure to consider an "unlocked" phone (that is, one in which the phone's tiny ID card, its SIM card, can be switched out). Then, when traveling overseas, you can replace your U.S. SIM card with a cheaper local one.