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A fully engaged yet also cautiously sobering account of how narrative inquiry will enhance research in social sciences, includes some already familiar names in the field such as Jermone Bruner (woo!), D. Jean Clandinin (hey...) and Catherine Riessman (umm). So far things are looking good in their introduction as they are ready to point out the various roads that lead to the same ideal destination: published research.

Two comforting conclusions to be drawn from the last chapter: novels will not die out entirely (although it would be a better place with a few less hundred million movie tie-in books) and that the holodeck will eventually become a storytelling machine, unless reality tv somehow gets the technology for Huxley's 'feelies' up and running beforehand. Gottschall celebrates the potential of the virtual world to make it so.

While Riessman may see herself as doing good around the world with her brand of narrative inquiry, it has a nasty underlying set of assumptions that she just could not have stumbled upon but rather set out to find: African-American teenage pregnancy, infertility and oppression in South India. What is missing in this chapter are studies of Russian mail-order brides and of transgendered lesbians in Venezuela or Belize.

This chapter provided about 40% of the sociological insight for the Cracked Podcast and even some innocuous obscenities to match the banter between David Wong and Jack O'Brien. It's all there: false memories, Bush seeing the first 9/11 plane crash, planted ideas about being lost in a mall or riding on a hot air balloon. Did Gottschall get the information out first and Cracked didn't acknowledge him or he listens too?

Pop culture maven Adolfus made a political career for himself and most of Europe burned because of his Wagnerian inspiration, but nevertheless he was on to something important about the fictional world: whether it was modelling his moustache after Charlie Chaplin, finding mass media as a nation-wide stage or acting out the operatic heroes, he stumbled his way to infamy when in other multiverses he's simply an artist.

Going from Dawkins' virus of the mind to McLuhan's global village, the things that bind a community together is a good story, whether or not they are morally right or wrong. Gottschall gives careful consideration to the evolutionary necessity of religious grouping, adding a line of caution that they tend to separate outsiders in dreadful ways. In the village, however, we are all happy readers, listeners and watchers.

Still trying to put my finger on what the difference is between this straight-up textbook and the more story-like books on narrative inquiry - certainly hope that it is not due to her being a female perspective on he so-far bromantic field of male authors, but it might be. The social sciences tend to be viewed more as a battleground for cultural agency, and more leading researchers get cited than actual storytellers.

There is an unsettling tone of earnestness to Riessman's writing about narrative inquiry, something that suggests this method is a shining beacon of justice for the oppressed. Yet unlike Bruner, Eco and Gottschall (so far) who seem to celebrate what story can do, she is more interested in limiting to field to saving the world through ethnography while ignoring her own bias towards oppression as she (sic)'d "mankind."

Before summing up today's reading, I have an interesting comment about the previous chapter's influence on my dream (a revision of Back to the Future) only to hear later this morning on a podcast that Doc Brown could be an older version of Marty McFly! A confabulation, coincidence or conspiracy? Two of these mind tricks are hard to believe, especially with a Sherlock Holmes working backward in logical loops.

Take that, Freud, and those RATs who believe that dreams are just mind garbage! These theories that dreams symbolize something or nothing detract from what dreams actually are. Gottschall takes the upper hand arguing that they are simulations of dangers and risky situations people and animals (those poor kitties operated upon by the jerk Jouvet) face in their waking lives. Bonus points for the nod to virtual reality.

The subtle shift from evolutionary biology to neuroscience is almost imperceptible, and yet the science being performed exclusively on other animals on behalf of human minds still have readers, watchers and listeners lighting up like a Christmas tree when engaged in the protagonist's problem. Gottschall sum it up susinctly with my favourite phrase so far: "Fiction is an ancient virtual reality technology..." (p. 59).

Gottschall goes all Vygotskian in relating how story is an important, yet hard to determine why, developmental stage for toddlers all the way up to adulthood. He gets all the grim, lurid details correct: kids are most creative causing trouble for their imaginary play, even stepping into code 46 territory by writing about how gender stereotypes are reinforced through play, and how art helps attract pretty naked women!

A great way to start off my narrative inquiry course, as well as launching off from my environmental thought course last term - learning how it has always been part of human nature to tell and listen to stories. Even dreams and especially daydreams (both happening more often than we think) are evidence that the Story People prevailed over the Practical People just as the Golgafrinchans did when they arrived on earth.

Really, using math to prove that something most astronomers already know exists exists? White dwarves may have all the numbers in order, and the authors high-fiving their way to all the cool parties, but is not something anyone on Earth will need to worry about for the next few ten thousand years. Would have rather heard more about how a neutrino star could suddenly take down a planet or a black hole solving gravity.

And so, dear readers, Cox and Forshaw bring their book to an end, except for the longish epilogue, with a fuzzy view of unobservable particles in the universe. They put a lot of stock in science's representation of reality and the potential for the Large Hadron Collidor to change everything we know yet dismiss, however, the tortured and surreal dreamers who see things differently - do they know how imagination works?

To celebrate the end of this fascinating study, Little Red takes the lead, as if she were following Umberto Eco's advice of walking in the woods, and there it is in the first printed version of the story: that uneasiness as she undresses and gets into bed with her supposedly sick grandmother. How true of the authors that narrative offers a way in for everyone regardless of age or levels of dysdisneyified prudishness.

As much as the authors try to push the "fun" Feynman physics identified as quantum electrodynamics, I'd rather stick with the sensible Schrödinger-type that includes many worlds in their field theory, even at the risk of missing out on the possibility of time traveling positrons that are consistent with earnest Einstein's Special Realitivity. Measuring words and putting them in a book changes this world's everything.

All hail the semiconductor, despite all the potential for really cool things that quantum physics can do (and the everything that does happen in the universe), controlling the flow of electrons is the most important. Kind of like the Graduate Ben Braddock finding out that the most important industry is plastics. Can't deny that the digital has its place in human innovation, just get to superposition already!

With renewed interest due to a second viewing of the excellent film Interstellar I am prepared to look past the reported "holistic drivel" the authors dismiss and take on the jargon of valence and square potential wells. One small reward for this persistence is a passing reference to superposition, unless I have missed earlier references entirely. Not yet prepared however to start reading from the beginning.

Newspaper, and the various forms that news traversed the spheres of private and public, and how the outlook for future file sharing will blur the spaces in between. Surprised to find that censorship laws for the first couple centuries of printed news did not allow local (or even national) news. Compare this to Huffington Ppst's recent inaccuracies reported as actual news, with a tiniest retraction printed at its end.

Back on solid ground, so to speak, in a straightforward account of how identical yet unique electrons move around the nucleus. Good to see that Mendeleev's Table still supports quantum number and the elusive spin-statistics, but while demonstrating why we don't fall through the floor the authors have left the question wide open for why we don't levitate in the air like Wile E. Coyote as he steps off of a cliff ledge.

Medicine and science are the pragmatically focus here, while also being the key players on academia's STEM stage. It looks like I am on the right track by searching for traces of quantum physics in literature from the late modern period. Of course, it would be great to go back as far as to include some of Shakespeare like Twelfth Night or Antony and Cleopatra but better save something for my thesis!

Doing my best to keep track of the metaphors employed, so now there are imaginary clocks lined up inside a basketball that somehow resemble the standing waves of a guitar string and a swimming pool because science. I would perhaps be in a more open frame of mind if the authors weren't so keen to do away with the myths and hocus pocus others (who exactly?) associate with quantum physics, like in Ozeki's Tale?

While Dearest Yuko is at the January sales with her friend, I sit at a Starbucks shopping for "an eclectic methodology for historical studies" into genre in general. Interested in the loosening of language in electronic text, compared to the handwritten letters home of previous centuries. Also got to find out how recipes have remained essentially unchanged, wonder if orange chocolate mocha will be made in the future.

Now they are working with a cluster of clocks, and while they reassure the readers that it is merely a device for explaining patterns in hard-to-visualize set of equations, it may be time to consider how apt this explaination will be in a decade or two where concepts like winding a clock will be as quaint as dialing a number on a rotatary phone. The end of this chapter moves into a digital understanding via a mp3Pod.

Terms like grammaticalisation and pragmaticalisation may be enough to scare off the casual English speakers, but the example of how markers such as "well", "as long as" and "Jesus" developed from one discursive function to a variety of other, typically more foul language. Finding out these expressions have a history, without having to learn many technical terms, makes this -icalisation process a lot less threatening.

More familiar ground covered in the final stretch, and it is a bit frustrating that the longest part of this collection was simply a reprint of another e-book I had bought last year and tried to work my way through (second time through didn't help make sense of most of it). Better luck with the other two chapters on Fever Pitch and the 2012 Olympics, as they both reveal the exhausting toll to be into sports.

The protocols for fiction's intrusion into the actual world takes a forked path, where in one direction there is the mostly harmless belief that Sherlock Holmes may have lived on Baker Street, while the other route takes us into the baffling area of conspiracy theories and secret societies. Wonder if novelist Dan Brown attended Eco's lecture, picking up the religiously frayed thread which sets more apart than unites.