Tales of the Metric System
Tales of the Metric System

Author: Imraan Coovadia

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2016-04-25

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 0821445642

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In Tales of the Metric System, Coovadia explores a turbulent South Africa from 1970 into the present. He takes his home country’s transition from imperial to metric measurements as his catalyst, holding South Africa up and examining it from the diverse perspectives of his many characters. An elite white housewife married to a radical intellectual; a rock guitarist; the same guitarist’s granddaughter thirty years later; a teenaged boy at the mercy of mob justice—each story takes place over one of ten days across the decades, and each protagonist has his own stakes, her own moment in time, but each is equally caught in the eddies of change. Tales of the Metric System is clear eyed, harrowing, and daring.

Whatever Happened to the Metric System?
Whatever Happened to the Metric System?

Author: John Bemelmans Marciano

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2014-08-05

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 160819941X

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The intriguing tale of why the United States has never adopted the metric system, and what that says about us. The American standard system of measurement is a unique and odd thing to behold with its esoteric, inconsistent standards: twelve inches in a foot, three feet in a yard, sixteen ounces in a pound, one hundred pennies to the dollar. For something as elemental as counting and estimating the world around us, it seems like a confusing tool to use. So how did we end up with it? Most of the rest of the world is on the metric system, and for a time in the 1970s America appeared ready to make the switch. Yet it never happened, and the reasons for that get to the root of who we think we are, just as the measurements are woven into the ways we think. John Marciano chronicles the origins of measurement systems, the kaleidoscopic array of standards throughout Europe and the thirteen American colonies, the combination of intellect and circumstance that resulted in the metric system's creation in France in the wake of the French Revolution, and America's stubborn adherence to the hybrid United States Customary System ever since. As much as it is a tale of quarters and tenths, it is a human drama, replete with great inventors, visionary presidents, obsessive activists, and science-loving technocrats. Anyone who reads this inquisitive, engaging story will never read Robert Frost's line “miles to go before I sleep” or eat a foot-long sub again without wondering, Whatever happened to the metric system?

The Dimensions of the Cosmos
The Dimensions of the Cosmos

Author: Randy Bancroft

Publisher: Outskirts Press

Published: 2016-03-30

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9781478773276

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Originally, our world was described using a plethora of provincial ad hoc measurement units only of everyday dimensions. The US inch was initially defined as the length of three barleycorn placed end-to-end, and is the current basis of US shoe sizes. The invention of the microscope and telescope in the 17th century revealed unimagined new macroscopic and microscopic worlds. The Dimensions of the Cosmos takes the reader on a tour of these hidden worlds with the only measurement system designed to intuitively describe them, the modern metric system. From metric worlds that describe atoms, viruses, bacteria, quantum dots, and pollen to those which describe planets, solar systems, stars, galaxies and the universe itself, the reader moves from Yoctoworld through Yottaworld. The sizes and stories of these objects are related so the reader experiences the immense diversity and wonder found in our current understanding of the natural world.

On the Scale, a Weighty Tale
On the Scale, a Weighty Tale

Author: Brian P. Cleary

Publisher: Millbrook Press

Published: 2010-08-01

Total Pages: 36

ISBN-13: 1580138454

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Introduces essential measurement units, from grams to pounds to tons.

The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga
The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga

Author: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2021-02-23

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 0821447300

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An epic story of a Bedouin family’s survival and legacy amid their changing world in the unforgiving Sahara Desert. Ahmed is a camel herder, as his father was before him and as his young son Abdullahi will be after him. The days of Ahmed and the other families in their nomadic freeg are ruled by the rhythms of changing seasons, the needs of his beloved camel herd, and the rich legends and stories that link his life to centuries of tradition. But Ahmed’s world is threatened—by the French colonizers just beyond the horizon, the urbanization of the modern world, and a drought more deadly than any his people have known. At first, Ahmed attempts to ignore these forces by concentrating on the ancient routines of herding life. But these routines are broken when a precious camel named Zarga goes missing. Saddling his trusted Laamesh, praying at the appointed hours, and singing the songs of his fathers for strength, Ahmed sets off to recover Zarga on a perilous journey that will bring him face to face with the best and the worst of humanity and test every facet of his Bedouin desert survival skills.

Postcolonial Poetics
Postcolonial Poetics

Author: Elleke Boehmer

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-06-27

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 3319903411

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Postcolonial Poetics is about how we read postcolonial and world literatures today, and about how the structures of that writing shape our reading. The book’s eight chapters explore the ways in which postcolonial writing in English from various 21st-century contexts, including southern and West Africa, and Black and Asian Britain, interacts with our imaginative understanding of the world. Throughout, the focus is on reading practices, where reading is taken as an inventive, border-traversing activity, one that postcolonial writing with its interests in margins, intersections, subversions, and crossings specifically encourages. This close, sustained focus on reading, reception, and literariness is an outstanding feature of the study, as is its wide generic range, embracing poetry, essays, and life-writing, as well as fiction. The field-defining scholar Elleke Boehmer holds that literature has the capacity to keep reimagining and refreshing how we understand ourselves in relation to the world and to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including resistance, reconciliation, survival after terror, and migration.

How Long or How Wide?
How Long or How Wide?

Author: Brian P. Cleary

Publisher: Lerner Digital ™

Published: 2017-08-01

Total Pages: 32

ISBN-13: 1512478768

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Audisee® eBooks with Audio combine professional narration and text highlighting for an engaging read aloud experience! Brian Cleary and Brian Gable bring their trademark sense of humor to the subject of measuring length. A rhyming text filled with funny examples explains how to use and compare metric and U.S. customary units of length. Readers are also introduced to the tools they need to measure length—rulers, metersticks, and more.

The African Novel of Ideas
The African Novel of Ideas

Author: Jeanne-Marie Jackson

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0691186448

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"This study focuses on the role of the philosophical novel--a genre that favors abstract concepts, or 'thinking about thinking,' over style, plot, or character development--and the role of philosophy more broadly in the intellectual life of the African continent"