From renowned physicist Fred Alan Wolf comes his enthralling and accessible exploration of parallel universes and the various theories surrounding them.

In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual grace, resulting in a work that has become a classic.

Ranging from an autobiographical tour-de-force that describes a childhood spent with an alcoholic father to Looking at Women, a reflection on male yearning and confusion, to a look at the place--or absence--of nature in recent American fiction.

In this volume, the author discusses the fundamental Greek contributions to science, drawing on the rich literary and archaeological sources for the period after Aristotle. Particular attention is paid to the Greeks' conceptions of the inquiries they were engaged on, and to the interrelations of science and philosophy, science and religion, and science and technology. In the first part of the book the author considers the two hundred years after the death of Aristotle, devoting separate chapters to mathematics, astronomy, and biology. He goes on to deal with Ptolemy and Galen and concludes with a discussion of later writers and of the problems raised by the question of the decline of ancient science.

First published in 1972, The Foxfire Book was a surprise bestseller that brought Appalachia's philosophy of simple living to hundreds of thousands of readers. Whether you wanted to hunt game, bake the old-fashioned way, or learn the art of successful moonshining, The Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center had a contact who could teach you how with clear, step-by-step instructions.

To his colleagues, Richard Feynman was not so much a genius as he was a full-blown magician: someone who "does things that nobody else could do and that seem completely unexpected." The path he cleared for twentieth-century physics led from the making of the atomic bomb to a Nobel Prize-winning theory of quantam electrodynamics to his devastating expos of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. At the same time, the ebullient Feynman established a reputation as an eccentric showman, a master safe cracker and bongo player, and a wizard of seduction.

No symbol of progress in our century is more galvanizing than electricity electric power and the technology it has spawned. The "invisible world" of electric energy that was emerging at the turn of the century is one we take for granted, but its influence on the growth and quality of city life was, and remains, profound. Using Chicago as a test case, Harold L. Platt investigates the emergence of an urban-based, energy-intensive society over the course of half a century in this first book-length history of energy use in the city.
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Can you multiply 362 x .5 quickly in your head? Could you readily calculate the square of 41? How much is 635 divided by 21/2? Can 727,648 be evenly divided by 8?
If any of these questions took you more than a few seconds to solve, you need this book. Short-Cut Math is a concise, remarkably clear compendium of about 150 math short-cuts -- timesaving tricks that provide faster, easier ways to add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
By using the simple foolproof methods in this volume, you can double or triple your calculation speed -- even if you always hated math in school. Here's a sampling of the amazingly effective techniques you will learn in minutes: Adding by 10 Groups; No-Carry Addition; Subtraction Without Borrowing; Multiplying by Aliquot Parts; Test for Divisibility by Odd and Even Numbers; Simplifying Dividends and Divisors; Fastest Way to Add or Subtract Any Pair of Fractions; Multiplying and Dividing with Mixed Numbers, and more.
The short-cuts in this book require no special math ability. If you can do ordinary arithmetic, you will have no trouble with these methods. There are no complicated formulas or unfamiliar jargon -- no long drills or exercises. For each problem, the author provides an explanation of the method and a step-by-step solution. Then the short-cut is applied, with a proof and an explanation of why it works.
Students, teachers, businesspeople, accountants, bank tellers, check-out clerks -- anyone who uses numbers and wishes to increase his or her speed and arithmetical agility, can benefit from the clear, easy-to-follow techniques given here.

"A wealth of intriguing and lovely ideas." -- Information Technology & Learning.
While the beauty of mathematics is often discussed, the aesthetic appeal of the discipline is seldom demonstrated as clearly as in this intriguing journey into the realms where art and mathematics merge. Aimed at a wide range of ages and abilities, this engrossing book explores the possibilities of mathematical drawing through compass constructions and computer graphics.
Compass construction is an extremely ancient art, requiring no special skills other than the care it takes to place a compass point accurately. For the computer graphics part of the present work, however, readers will need some familiarity with basic high school mathematics-mainly algebra and trigonometry. Still, much of the book can be enjoyed even by "mathophobes," for it is about lines and circles and how to put them together to make various patterns, both abstract and natural.
One hundred and six full-page drawings, ranging from totally abstract to somewhat pictorial, demonstrate the possibilities of mathematical drawing and serve as inspiration to readers to carry out their own creative investigations. Among the illustrations are such intriguing configurationsas a five-point egg, golden ratio, 17-gon, plughole vortex, blancmange curve, Durer's pentagons, pentasnow, turtle geometry, and many more. In guiding students toward the comprehension and creation of such figures, the author explains helpful basic principles (of number, length and angle) as well as reviewing relevant fundamentals of trigonometry. In addition, he has provided numerous useful exercises (with answers} at the ends of the chapters, together with recommended further reading, detailed in the bibliography. 211 black-and-white illustrations. Bibliography. Index.