I took a blog break of a week or so for a couple of reasons. First of all, I was technically impaired – something wrong with my cache – and second, I was immersed in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. It is a challenge to absorb his lucid examination of worlds both extraordinarily small and massive, so much so as to inspire a kind of vertigo. A couple of the more dizzying facts he offers: Our galaxy is one of some hundred thousand million, each galaxy containing some hundred thousand million stars. (48)(T)here is no unique absolute time, but instead each individual has his own personal measure of time that depends on where he is and how he is moving. (44) Apparently, on Earth, sea level is the place to be.