Cooper has the clever idea of making his mom pancakes for her birthday, and his friend the moose offers to help. The moose claims he's the best chef in Alaska, but is he really? Find out if Cooper's mom is happy about the surprise awaiting her in the kitchen!

A sundial is the oldest tool used to tell time. Make a simple sundial using rocks, a paper plate, and a pencil. Track how the shadow made by the sun moves throughout the day.

This guide to making wooden sundials gently leads beginning diallists into sundial lore and construction. Novice craftsmen who can wield a saw, wood-burning pen, matte knife, sandpaper and a few other simple tools can make five different kinds of sundials; plans are flexible and allow for embellishment, alteration, variety of materials. Precalculated templates can be removed from the book and carbon-paper-transferred to wood.

Presents step-by-step instructions for making a sundial which will illustrate concepts regarding the interrelation of the sun, the earth's rotation, and time.

How would you go about rebuilding a technological society from scratch? If our technological society collapsed tomorrow what would be the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors? What crucial knowledge would they need to survive in the immediate aftermath and to rebuild civilization as quickly as possible? Human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population. It has built on itself for centuries, becoming vast and increasingly specialized. Most of us are ignorant about the fundamental principles of the civilization that supports us, happily utilizing the latest—or even the most basic—technology without having the slightest idea of why it works or how it came to be. If you had to go back to absolute basics, like some sort of postcataclysmic Robinson Crusoe, would you know how to re-create an internal combustion engine, put together a microscope, get metals out of rock, or even how to produce food for yourself? Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. Every piece of technology rests on an enormous support network of other technologies, all interlinked and mutually dependent. You can’t hope to build a radio, for example, without understanding how to acquire the raw materials it requires, as well as generate the electricity needed to run it. But Dartnell doesn’t just provide specific information for starting over; he also reveals the greatest invention of them all—the phenomenal knowledge-generating machine that is the scientific method itself. The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world.

A rigorous appraisal of sundial science includes mathematical treatment and pertinent astronomical background, plus a nontechnical treatment so simple that several of the dials can be built by children. 106 illustrations.