How do you measure the size of the planet you're standing on? "Circumference" is the story of what happened when one man asked himself that very question. Nicholas Nicastro brings to life one of history's greatest experiments when an ancient Greek named Eratosthenes first accurately determined the distance around the spherical earth. In this fascinating narrative history, Nicastro takes a look at a deceptively simple but stunning achievement made by one man, millennia ago, with only the simplest of materials at his disposal. How was he able to measure the land at a time when distance was more a matter of a shrug and a guess at the time spent on a donkey's back? How could he be so confident in the assumptions that underlay his calculations: that the earth was round and the sun so far away that its rays struck the ground in parallel lines? Was it luck or pure scientific genius? Nicastro brings readers on a trip into a long-vanished world that prefigured modernity in many ways, where neither Eratosthenes' reputation, nor the validity of his method, nor his leadership of the Great Library of Alexandria were enough to convince all his contemporaries about the dimensions of the earth. Eratosthenes' results were debated for centuries until he was ultimately vindicated almost 2000 years later, during the great voyages of exploration. "Circumference" is a compelling scientific detective story that transports readers back to a time when humans had no idea how big their world was--and the fate of a man who dared to measure the incomprehensible.

Provides the 300 most useful manhour tables for practically every item of construction. Labor requirements are listed for sitework, concrete work, masonry, steel, carpentry, thermal and moisture protection, doors and windows, finishes, mechanical, and electrical. Each section details the work being estimated and gives appropriate crew size and equipment needed. This new revised edition contains National Estimator, a computer estimating program. This fast, powerful program and complete instructions are yours free on high-density 3 1/2" disk when you buy the book.

Translated by Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu. Chinese writer Lao Yang's PEE POEMS go deep and dark--with deceptive lightness--into the metaphysical and the social, offering insight and humor along the way. Written over the past decade, this iconoclastic collection is the first of Yang's to be translated from Chinese into English. PEE POEMS is comprised of meditations, fragments, lyrics, and aphorisms, in dialogue with Chan hermit poets and Zen tricksters, with radical grassroots activism, experimental music, and Dada. Yang regards the body's most basic functions and desires as philosophical problems, restoring garbage and bladder-control to the field of politics, inhabiting both epochal and local time. In PEE POEMS vocabulary fights itself, while impossible opposites are lovingly conjoined. Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu, poets both and friends of the author, translate Yang with brave tenderness, revealing a thinker whose observations are as simple and as rich as the languages we speak. In the mythos of Chinese ethnogenesis, the sage king Yu countered the great flood by diverting it into rural irrigation. The contemporary Chinese poet Lao Yang adopts a more irreverent strategy for liquid transport, urination (with an emphasis on the nation). This apocalyptic book reads like the waste journals of a survivalist on the run from carnivorous leviathans, God, and the Chinese state. Calling to mind the work of Raul Zurita and Kim Hyesoon, Yang's PEE POEMS consist of crystalline scatalogy, expressions of a profane piety. I can't quite recall reading another poetry book that felt simultaneously this elemental and funny.--Ken Chen In these irreverent poems, we see a fearless spirit in confronting the darkness and absurdity around the poet. An extraordinary collection.--Ha Jin Burrowing trinkets of sound and fury, these poems shoot inward like velvet claws, evoking a courageous loneliness and despair that spits out flowers in return.--Rob Mazurek These poems eat themselves. There's nothing for me to say. Nonetheless I send them to everyone I know. They're all shaking their heads saying this is so good. These poems are so good I can't point, I can only send them out. They are out there. Truly, yay.--Eileen Myles These crisp, lean and clean words of Yang conjure up a landscape situated in uncertain times and with movable spiritual boundaries. Determined to resist the powerful tides of propaganda from political and commercial life, Yang's poems here, like his struggle in the real world, intrigue, provoke and challenge simultaneously.--Zhang Er Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies.

Twenty-eight contemporary American poets reflect on the poems that have most influenced their own creative vision and offer their best new works in this examination of poetic expression. Each entry includes a new poem from the author, the text of a poem or poems that particularly influenced the development of the new poem, and an essay about that influence. The dialogue created between the new works of the poets and the poems that they love provides insight into the poetic process and speaks to the meaning and endurance of great art.

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Translated by Pauline Fan. TELL ME, KENYALANG is a collection of poems by Kulleh Grasi, a writer and musician from Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. This groundbreaking book is one of a handful of contemporary works of poetry written in Malay to be translated into English and the first in decades to include Malaysian indigenous languages. Translator Pauline Fan brings the work into a thrilling, living English. Kulleh Grasi's poems are entirely new and yet intimate. They are entwined with myth and nature and yet are fully post-modern. They are outside the context of American poetry and also deeply inside the questions and experiences American poets are grappling with today: questions of identity in relation to nation and language and sexuality. Grasi, both a known poet and rock star in Malaysia, writes new rivers and islands into the landscape of identity. Grasi says: "I was reading all kinds of Malay literature. None of it spoke from the experience of Borneo's indigenous people, so I started keeping journals, writing about the lives of indigenous communities that I observed with my own eyes. This was the true beginning of my poetry." TELL ME, KENYALANG will change the way people think of contemporary poetry throughout the world and about the role of indigenous languages in global literature and in translation. The book is a powerhouse.

Join Sir Cumference, Lady Di of Ameter, and their son Radius for wordplay, puns, and problem solving in this geometry-packed math adventure. King Arthur was a good ruler, but now he needs a good ruler. What would you do if the neighboring kingdom were threatening war? Naturally, you'd call your strongest and bravest knights together to come up with a solution. But when your conference table causes more problems than the threat of your enemy, you need expert help. Enter Sir Cumference, his wife Lady Di of Ameter, and their son Radius. With the help of the carpenter, Geo of Metry, this sharp-minded team designs the perfect table conducive to discussing the perfect plan for peace. The first in Sir Cumference series, Sir Cumference and the First Round Table makes math fun and accessible for everyone.

For fans of the Sir Cumference series with Pi on their mind, here is the second installment in this fun look at math and language. This time the math adventure is centered around a potion that changes Sir Cumference into a fire-breathing dragon. Can Radius change him back? Join Radius on his quest through the castle to solve a riddle that will reveal the cure. It lies in discovering the magic number that is the same for all circles. Perfect for parent and teachers who are looking to make math fun and accessible for everyone.