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The appendix offers some off-colour portrayals of some household names in the field of science: Einstein's outspokenness on world politic, Galileo pissing off his friend the Pope, and Newton destroying others' careers - it reads more like a Cracked.com listicle that a hagiography of scientific minds. Two of these so-called great minds lost Epic Rap Battles to Hawking and Nye; who's next to throw down Big Daddy G. G.?

A fitting conclusion for a far-ranging unified theory that incorporates the infinite stack of turtles and sun gods to quantum theory and the big crunch, all the while promoting the idea that eventually everyone should be able to get the universe. Alas, current science has become to specialized, and modern-day philosophers to content with rope-tricks and word games however my quantumeracy will be a very timely theory.

String theory is a very appealing way of understanding the universe and its four forces, perhaps even the ten to twenty-six dimensions curved up inside it. The Brief History is an ironing out of possibilities: his horse example let me see the life-giving single cell organisms as two-dimensional creatures (digesting food may cause them to split in half and multiply) making space-time for three dimensional us.

Some of the bonus material available to illustrated edition, wormholes and time travel get serious attention - perhaps that mysterious flying object over the 2012 London Olympics was a member of the Alpha Centauri Congress coming back to place a bet on the 100-meter race. Glad that the virtual antiparticles can move backward in time, and so they might be able to transmit a chronology protection conjecture cheat code.

Lining up the arrows of time to construct an argument for why the universe will continue going form ordered to a disordered state is an exceptional challenge, especially as the movie Ran teaches, three arrows are strong but not unbreakable. Hawking gets a bit sidetracked with stockmarkets and roulette wheels, but only proves time can be reversed - people do win big payouts on both, so time can repeat itself.

Equivocating with the Pope and having a three hundred year connection to Galileo is just inviting trouble but all for a good cause: if in the classical general relativity the universe has a beginning but no end (or even a boundary), why not switch over to quantum gravity and let the sum over histories sort things out? The idea put forth that imaginary time lets the observer do all of the above is really, really cool.

Moving on with time's Brief History, Hawking goes back to the blackboard to calculate how black holes ain't all that, letting out virtual particles and radiation. Even the event horizon grows bigger as it takes in matter. His research may have prompted Disney to make the 1979 Black Hole, employing a different set of rules than last year's Interstellar, neither have a spaghettified spaceman.

For what seems to be Hawking's big breakthrough onto the science scene, he recklessly bets on a couple of major discoveries, usually with Kip Thorne and often involving naked people - one can only hope that his bet with Kip and John Preskill didn't actually involve any nude physicists - but perhaps this is par for the course when cosmic censorship hypotheses only tease hard scientists but have yet to go full frontal.

For what seems to be Hawking's big breakthrough onto the science scene, he recklessly bets on a couple of major discoveries, usually with Kip Thorne and often involving naked people - one can only hope that his bet with Kip and John Preskill didn't actually involve any nude physicists - but perhaps this is par for the course when cosmic censorship hypotheses only tease hard scientists but have yet to go full frontal.

The subatomic investigation uncovers a host of quarks, gluons and virtual particles while Hawking's history also becomes more autobiographical: he shares fellowships and professorship with a number of chief physicist, many others all vying for the legitimizing Nobel Prize. While it is great to see the virtual playing an integral part of what make the four forces function, I am surprised that James Joyce coined quark!

Introducing the Q team, Hawking gives a good description of how classical mechanics was just a best-guess for things too small to see, yet not untestable. The double-slit experiment and the uncertainty principle give scientist the numbers they need to prove their imagined model of quantum behaviour are based upon a reality wilder than most could imagine. Hawking spares no exclamation point to ease us into surreality.

The story of the universe could end with this chapter, using the position of other galaxies and the light spectrum evidence that each is moving away from the others, if only more facts were known about how this story began. The Big Bang is a likely theory as it fits in with most of last century's math, and surprisingly the Roman Catholic view of God's first move, but I am more interested in what happens in media res.

If Hawking's chapters followed Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, the second chapter would be the call to adventure - perhaps intentionally? - taking the ordinariness of Aristotle's model of the cosmos and boldly announcing there is more going on around us. For space-time to bend to a massy object allowed Einstien to fine tune his theory of relativity into a general one. Guess my next step is to refuse prior chapters.

Is it too silly that I am just now starting to read Hawking's big book, with pictures, a few weeks after watch The Theory of Everything? It seems like a hardened hard scientist would have read this at the age of eight, without any illustration or movie tie-ins, and started applying Hawking's knowledge toward designing a better MineCraft space according to science. My turtle-like progress has its own purpose.

Is it too silly that I am just now starting to read Hawking's big book, with pictures, a few weeks after watch The Theory of Everything? It seems like a hardened hard scientist would have read this at the age of eight, without any illustration or movie tie-ins, and started applying Hawking's knowledge toward designing a better MineCraft space according to science. My turtle-like progress has its own purpose.

Well, I'm very impressed with how this chapter changed my mind about ethnography, a more purposeful method, while also making me more aware about the occupiers of a contested country and their less than complicit view on the pioneering past and militaristic present. Even the second example of how observed people deal with personal issues in public ways provides evidence that minds will change when stories are shared.

A very short chapter, but so much metatext to unpack - how did Tolstoy know, when writing War and Peace that a century later Vincent from Pulp Fiction would be talkin' to some two-bit hold-up artists about the different path he is on, and how this change had made all the difference? The economic story is just one of the paths we can choose, should't ignore, but definitely not let one story rule all.

An impressive cast of characters: Richard Feynman, Václav Havel and Oscar Wilde all working together to un-mono-tize our culture by presenting parallel stories to the economic one. The image of sailing a ship in any winds is nicely countered by the stone sinking without making any ripples. Paradigms shift with eating homecooked meals, stepping off the concrete to make paths in the grass or communicating nonviolently.

The story of economicized education is a sad fact for anyone wanting to connect with the arts at the expense of career-friendly choices like an MBA or medical degree (despite what the previous chapter on physical health warned against). Even science, the crowning academic field of STEM subjects, suffers from the need to patent discoveries. Art as creativity have two economic stories: pre-romantic use and po-mo money.

Back on the non-qualitative track with Donileen Loseke's informative chapter on analyzing "Formula Stories" - those familiar yet hard to put a finger upon narrative that shape many possible worlds in research. She provides a couple more practical steps while demonstrating a healthy curiosity towards why people choose to write a story as they did. Close readings may take many routes and encourage scholarly re-reading.

Prisons, libraries, hospitals and churches: each place has seemingly little to do with the other; even with a stretched metaphor of caring while curing ills in society, there is only tangential connection between punishing crime and improving literacy, or healing others to inspiring piety. Yet each area of the greater circle of community gets sucked into the economic story which simply adds the profit-making to care.

The single author, who makes a habit of referring to her narrative inquiry research in the first-person plural, further complicates her findings by also collecting "non-stories" and supposedly analyzing them. It is a tall order already to fit together both quantitative and qualitative methods of data analysis but when it comes to trying to make sense of people's posts on a post-9/11 website, maybe it isn't this hard.

1950 becomes this magical year of work-life balance that gets upset when the story changes, and employees start to see themselves as reality TV stars with portable skills and a last-person standing attitude. The effect this shift has on the community and the natural biodiverse world makes caring for others only possible if there is something to gain from this interaction. An extra five minutes is a way to make money?

Adam Smith wrote two big books on the social forces that motivate human action, and while his Theory of Moral Sentiment would have provided a good psychological map to understanding how we are all the same, the author of Monoculture sets up how many levels of society went the other way, Ied by the invisible hand to a market-based worldview. The economic story needs to be recognized for what it does.

Okay, decision time: how much further in this book do I have to read? It is not going anywhere special, the pyromaniac narrator sees nothing wrong with her father being a shiftless smartass, or her mother being more into art than raising the rest of her family. Not that her siblings are much to write home about, if any of them had a place like home for more than a season. And ragging on kids who like Santa! Too much.

So that's all, Shakespearean folks? The series wraps up with a very ambiguous ending, if indeed this is the final series. Did anyone actually kill Shakespeare? Othello left deranged, Titus still yet to appear and Lady Macbeth no more than a red herring. It would have been an implausible yet a not-entirely unexpected twist to have Cesario turn out to be a resurrected Romeo. Maybe the board game to finishes this story?

Why does the story always start and end in New York? As if the only way to demonstrate a protagonist lives a healthy life and has a successful career is an apartment on Park Avenue. Even though I can tell that there are going be lots of ups and downs, mostly downs for her alcoholic father and carefree, homeless mother, how come the critically praised Walls, who out-Dickens Dickens, could not start somewhere original?

Nice to see a storyline more focused upon the female characters, and Viola versus Juliet makes for some interesting tension; yet with every other character ready to turn upon the other the Boreas proves to be on stormier seas that much of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, and this is only two chapters into a four-part series. So how are Lady Macbeth, Titus and zombie Romeo going to cram into the story?

As luck would have it, Feldman and Almquist's chapter is one of the four I have to present a class discussion on, and it hits the nail on the head with steps towards a rhetorical analysis. Simply distinguishing between syllogisms and enthymemes is key to seeing the issues (and oppositions) in a clear academic light. Not so in awe of the otherwise awesome sounding narrative network analysis: more balloons, not pylons!

So what was that all about? Narrative is still a fascinating mode of inquiry, and it seems like the author here wanted to show how well it can handle diverse voices coming from a single interviewee, but what was that all about? She presents multiple languages and provides translations for authenticity but then jumbles it up with a bunch of discourse analysis punctuation that only confuses readers more than clarifies.