Product Description
An essential resource for scholars and a treat for curious readers, this uniquely detailed history of American weights and measures traces these everyday standards back to their originals and explains the ancient trade system on which they are based. ... Read more

Product Description
Written for researchers who come across unfamiliar units of weights andmeasurements, this is the ideal companion to keep by your side when perusing wills, inventories,accounts, and old journals. How can we possibly appreciate the ancient manorial system withoutan understanding of oxgangs and hides? How can we come to grips with early population listingswithout knowing about virgates and farthingales? We now know, for instance, that a firkin ofsoap weighs 64 pounds, that a hogshead of claret contains 46 gallons, that a faggot of firewood is36 inches in length, that a chest of Indian tea weighs 126 pounds, and if that isn't enough you'llalso learn that in the year 1650 you could have a tooth extracted for about one shilling! What abook! ... Read more

Product Description

Boost Your grades with this illustrated quick-study guide. You will use it from high school to college and beyond. The full version is absolutely FREE.

Customer Reviews (11)

Useful
This was a freebie, so I thought why not download to have as a reference.I think my husband would use it more than I, but for free - why not?There is so much information in this book - it contains any conversion imaginable.

Useful to have on your laptop
publications like this are why I enjoy Kindle for laptop.THis book is handy to have on hand, on your laptop.

What a waste
Maybe to the naive this might be an interesting collection of drivel but if you really want a source for conversion factors you'd do much better with numerous online sites.I can only surmise that the person who compiled this did it as a lark.I'm guessing that many of the terms, if they are indeed real, are from the UK.I'm an engineer and often have to convert our inch/pound system to metric units but this collection is almost worthless.How about units like "coomb" and "kilderkin" and "firkin" and "rood" or "twip".Of course maybe you really do need to know that both "stremma" and "dunham" = 1000 sq meters.

Things you never knew
Very through. Some of the measures, etc were new to me. I may not know how to do the math to figure something out, but I found it interesting.A good quick reference to have on your kindle.

Great Reference Work - Highly Recommended!
The "Weights and Measures Study Guide", besides being free, is a very handy collection of units, definitions, and formulas for just every field. The book has all of the units you would expect (Length, Area, Volume, Speed, Force, Energy, Electricity, Viscosity, Temperature) and also adds worthwhile sections on the various histories of systems (English, Metric, etc) and conversion guides.

While this looks good on the Kindle and formats just fine, it actually is very handy to have on the iTouch\iPhone and PC with the free Kindle App. On the iTouch it is the perfect pocket reference for when I'm working in my shop and am away from the computer.

The navigation is good, complete with a linked Table of Contents, but the only issue I found was that the "Start" page was the middle of a chapter - not the Cover Page. Once I figured that out, it was easy enough to get started.

Overall, this is a great free book with a huge amount of information that is very useful to students, professionals, and the overly curious. I leave mine "parked" on the conversion guide page since that is extremely helpful information.

Highly Recommended!

CFH ... Read more

Product Description
Miriam N. Kotzin's ability to use an eclectic scope of formal approaches in her book Weights & Measures is remarkable; she writes everything from prose poems to a crown of sonnets, "Tea Ceremonies in Winter," which is as deep and clear as a tarn. Her subject matter is wide and varied, too, ranging from the grim to the empyrean. What I like best about her work is that it is not merely musical, but that it is beautifully clear in its meanings. It's hard to write real language music at the same time that one writes to be understood, but Miriam Kotzin can do it, and she does it well. Readers should love this collection.-Lewis TurcoMiriam Kotzin's Weights & Measures is an impressive collection, with fastidious craftsmanship, accuracy of vision, and a depth of feeling that we seldom see so happily combined.-David SlavittIn Weights & Measures, poet Miriam Kotzin connects with the reader so immediately that her craftsmanship works unnoticed until the last word of each poem invites rereading, this time with growing awareness of how that word has been arrived at and prepared for.-Rhina P. Espaillat ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Life and Art as one.
Kotzin manages to combine perfectly crafted forms with visual imagery that recalls painting at it's best.
Word people and visual people will both be moved by her work. ... Read more

Product Description
This comprehensive and authoritative dictionary provides clear definitions of units, prefixes, and styles of weights and measures within the Systeme International (SI), as well as traditional, and industry-specific units. It also includes general historical and scientific background, covering the development of the sequential definitions and sizing of units. This new reference work will prove invaluable to professional scientists, engineers, technicians as well as to students and the general user. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

comprehensive but not exhaustive
Plenty of details. However somewhat cumbersome to navigate and not as exhaustive ed.as I expect.

Very Good
This gives a very authoritive discussion on many of the topics of regular and metric measures. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A must for your collection of study guides
I collected ALL of these in the series and I am so glad I did. These charts have become incredibly helpful and educational for both my own studies and reference as an MT, as well as my children using them for general knowledge and school work. I would highly recommend and buy again. ... Read more

Product Description
How long is a foot? What is the metric system? What weighs more, a ton of feathers or a ton of Hershey's candy? Author and educator Jerry Pallotta answers these and lots of other questions as only he can--using Hershey's Kisses, Twizzlers candies, Hershey's chocolate bars, and more to teach weights and measurements. Rob Bolster's comical clowns demonstrate the concepts. This is the eighth book in the series by Pallotta and Bolster, who have taught kids counting by fives, addition, subtraction, fractions, multiplication, percents, shapes, and patterns.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Excellent book
This book is great to use with children to introduce measurement.I absolutely love this book.

Hershey's Weights and Measures
A fun way for young students to see the concept of weights and measures.Of course it makes you hungry for some chocolate, but after a session of learning what a cool way to end the study.

Excellent book to teach kids the basics of measurement!
This is an excellent book to help kids learn the basics of measurement. As an elementary school teacher, I have been using this book year after year and I have definitely seen the great results reflected in the standardized tests scores (as opposed to those teachers who have not used this book and have struggled to make kids aware of measurement units).

This book shows the kids what a centimeter, a decimeter, etc look like as well as the standard units like an inch, a yard, and so on. This book makes kids visualize measurement units in a very clear way by comparing a centimeter with an M&M candy, or an inch with a miniature hershey chocolate. In the second part of the book, it shows kids weight units as well.

I fully disagree with the other reviewer of this book (who I am rather positive is not a teacher and has never struggled with teaching measurement to kids). This book is not intended to be used every day feeding kids with chocolates or candies, but to be used only once so that kids understand the concepts in an appealing and fun way, and it is our duty like teachers to subsequently reinforce the learning with other exercises not related to sugar intaking.

This book is a must for every elementary school teacher who needs to teach math and is concerned about their kids' progress. But don't take my word for it. Give it a try and see for yourself!

This is appalling
Teach your kid to use Weights and Measures and poison him/herself with sugar and empty calories at the same time!
Perhaps Hershey's should also create a book on Dental Hygiene,
weight control and the advantages of hyperactivity.

I suppose this is approved by the Bush administration's Dept. of Education. Anything to keep corporate America happy! Pathetic. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Our Bisected Lives
Anselm Eibenschütz's life is rudely bisected in the first chapter of "Das Falsche Gewicht".His first life had been spent as an 'honest soldier' in an artillery regiment, rising slowly through the ranks over twelve years to NCO. Then he married, out of loneliness, left the comforting 'regularity' of army life and became two things he'd never prepared himself to be: a civilian and a 'regulator', the inspector of weights and measures in a remote province on the eastern border between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russia. There, where everyone lives by smuggling and by cheating each other reciprocally in the scales of life, the good soldier Eibenschütz tries to live by his measured sense of his own integrity. It doesn't work out so easily for him, yet in a sense his second life is richer than his first, as he begins to perceive another side of existence - the "out" side: nature, rain, birds or absence of birds, the seasons, love, the sorrows of others ...

Author Joseph Roth was also a man whose life was bisected. He was born in a Jewish village in remote rural Galicia; he left that pre-modern world and moved to Vienna, to cities of Germany, eventually to Paris. Presumably, at times, he felt some astonishment that he, a thoroughly urban and urbane journalist, should have odd dissociated memories of once being a boy in an extinct time-and-place. That feeling of bifurcation shouldn't be mistaken for nostalgia or for any longing to "go home again". Roth, like others whose biographies have been bisected by modernity, knew that that life that could not be relived, that that place no longer existed. Yet he still existed, with a sense of "wonder" at himself, such as one feels when looking at old black-and-white photos. Quite likely I'm projecting, but I'm sure this sense of a 'bisected life' is extremely common in our times. Of all writers in English, Alice Munro has been most evocative and persuasive in her tales of women, like herself, whose mentalities straddle two lives.

The world of Anselm Eibenschütz, then, is the world of Joseph Roth's previous life. It's not truly a 'lost' world; it exists as long as Roth remembers it... or as long as his literary evocations of it are read. Perhaps this was Roth's primary impulse in writing about his haplessly straight soldier in the crooked borderland of Zlotogrod, simply to report and record. But there are complexities in this simple story, written in such elemental narrative language, like a folk tale, like a "conte" from the pen of Theodor Storm or some other 19th C romancer. Is it possibly a parable, without revealing its self-consciousness? Why are 'weights and measures' so central to the story? Why are the characters given such slyly allegorical names? The wife is 'Regina". The violent innkeeper's name - Leibusch - evokes carnality in German. And how about "Anselm Eibenschütz"? Anselm? What a name for a Moravian artilleryman of Jewish heritage. "Eibe" is German for 'yew', the tree traditionally associated with graveyards, the darktree one sees in the most tormented paintings of Vincent van Gogh. "Schütz" comes from the German word for 'shoot', but it's also the word for a watchman or guard. Explicating an allusion is a thankless task, but hey. someone has to do it.

That lawless border village, with flux of deserters from the armies of both empires, has been the setting of earlier novels by Roth. The tavern where the nameless and re-named fugitives huddle briefly is effectively the same tavern, and the scoundrel Kapturak who profits from this human traffic is the same scoundrel. Even the names of minor characters, like Mendel Singer, are recycled from other novellas, though they can't possibly be the identical person. Roth doesn't make any of this obvious, but the reader has to suppose he meant something by it. The usual critical consensus is that Roth was not a careful craftsman in his fiction, with the one great exception of his classic "The Radetzky March". Often it's true; a reader will find that a given book is beautifully written but seemingly sketchy, or that it's magically interesting except for 'chapter X', which is tedious and irrelevant. Often one has to rave about the whole while acknowledging flaws in parts.

That's not the case with "Weights and Measures". This is a tightly structured, concise, deftly crafted piece of writing. There isn't a wasted description or an out-of-tune paragraph. Here's a sample, from early in the narrative when Eibenschütz is first encountering his isolation in Zlotogrod:"Sometimes in the night he sat up in bed and contemplated his wife. In the yellowish gleam of the nightlight, which stood on top of the wardrobe and seemed to intensify the darkness in the room by creating a kind of luminous nocturnal aura, the sleeping Frau Eibenschütz looked to her husband like a dried fruit. He sat up in bed and regarded her closely. The longer he looked, the lonelier he felt. It was as if the mere sight of her made him lonely. She did not belong to him, to Anselm Eibenschütz, as she lay there, with her fine breasts and her childish peaceful face ... Desire no longer urged him towards her as it had in earlier nights." What reader, after this revealing description, will not be expecting one of them, wife or husband, to find desire elsewhere?

Others were more famous. His fame will last longer
My headline is a statement by another writer in exile, about Joseph Roth after he had drunk himself to death in Paris in 1939. He had fled Austria after the `Anschluss', the joyful rejoining of Austria with the big brothers.

One of his last works was this short novel. Properly translated its title would be The False Weight. It is a kind of sequel to Radetzky March. We meet some of the same people again, like policeman Franz Slama, though none from the neo-aristocratic Trotta family of the large novel. We also meet Mendel Singer from Roth's Job. The story is set in the Far East of Kakania, in the same district of Galicia, where Russian deserters hang out before they are shipped elsewhere.

Roth's style was very accessible, one might call it artless. He told a story and sometimes commented on it in the process, as a traditional puppet player would. His simple prose has surprising moments of poetry. It is the language of fairy tales. The book even starts like one: once upon a time...
I have been discussing the question whether Roth was nostalgic about the fallen Austrian and Hungarian double monarchy. In the case of the Radetzky March I denied that. Based on False Weight, I may need to reconsider. There is clearly a case of nostalgia for something that failed: the hope for a workable multinational country without nationalisms. Certainly our hero is nostalgic for his army life, and later for his lost lover.

Our hero is a Moravian ex soldier with the beautiful name Anselm Eibenschuetz. An Eibe is a yew tree, and a Schuetz is a shooter. His unloved wife had convinced him to quit military service and take a government position. Now he is far from home and far from his beloved barracks, in charge of controlling weights and measures, friendless, suspect and unpopularly uncorrupt. Empires need corruption like transmission oil. He represents law and order but can't keep it up. Human weaknesses erode his standing and he drifts into a life of dishonesty, unexpected passion, and bottomless drink. (Inside him burned the liquor when he had drunk, and the longing for it, when he had not.)

This edition is the only one that I could find in English, and there has been no previous reviewer. What a shame.

... Read more

Product Description
How many caramels in a pound? Who caught the biggest fish? Learn how balances and scales help you with the heavy lifting of measuring weight. ... Read more

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There are millions of things to measure . . . and almost as many ways to measure them!

Customer Reviews (3)

GREAT Illustrations and GREAT learning tool!
I looked at this book first because it is illustrated by one of my favorite artisits, but after reading it I realized it was also a great learning tool.We have read and referenced this book MANY times over the last 2 years, checking it out from the library so many times, I finally decided I needed to buy it!It is great for ANY age to help teach or revisit units of measurement.I have 3 children, everytime one of them begins a measurement unit at school, we send it in for the teacher to read in class and they LOVE it! But it is also just fun to read and look at!I have been asked to read it or caught the kids reading it even when we are not "studying"!My youngest is 3 and not quite old enough to grasp the concepts, but LOVES the pictures and because it is written so well and in a "fun" way, she enjoys listening to the story without even realizing she is learning!It is a wonderful book and while your at, you should search out other books by this author and illustrator!They are both equally amazing at what they do individually, but teamed up in this book (and their others) it is just wonderful!

An excellent childrens book on measurement
We recently got "Millions to Measure" for our daughter and it's a wonderful introduction to measuring systems and how they've progressed over time.
If you've got a small child and want to introduce them to measuring systems, I highly recommend this book.

Measuring Made Easy and Fun.....
"There are millions of things-and many ways-to measure.Let's fly back in time and see how people measured many years ago..."Marvelosissimo the Magician's takes the reader from prehistoric times to the present on an entertaining and informative tour of measurement.Author, David Schwartz's engaging text, written in an easy to read, conversational style, tells the story of length, weight, and volume, and is rich in history, fun facts, and trivia.Illustrator, Steven Kellogg's cartoon-like artwork is bright and playful and each busy page is filled with humor, eye-catching, expressive detail, and clever asides.Youngsters will revel in all the easy to understand, measuring fun.A terrific explanation of the metric system concludes this little gem of a picture book, and both students and teachers will find hours of fun practicing and using the concepts they learn here. ... Read more

Product Description
The energetic narrator of Me Counting Time and Me on the Map is back, this time introducing young readers to the units of measure. What’s the difference between a cup and an ounce? What gets measured in bushels and when do you use a scale? Easy-to-understand text and playful corresponding illustrations teach children the differences between wet and dry measurements, weight, size, and length. And all information is conveyed in a unique kid’s-eye perspective, using everyday objects and situations. Me and the Measure of Things makes measurement fun–and comprehensible!


From the Trade Paperback edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Focus on Measurement
This is a good book for your first, second grade level students to help them focus on measurement and how it applies to their lives.Good introductory activity.

Amazed at how interested my kids are in it !
To be honest I bought this book purely for education value (and also because my little one likes the other books in this series so much), fully expecting that I'd have to coax my little ones into reading it... while I found it stone cold boring (the author admittedly has a difficult task ahead of her - how is it humanly possible to write an interesting story about inches, pounds and ounces ?!? ) my 4 and 6 year olds ask me to read it to them again and again.It could be because they liked the other books (Me and My Place in Space and Me and My Amazing Body - both excellent, excellent books I strongly recommend then for your little ones) so much that they like this one too.I'd recommend grabbing the other two books I mentioned and reading them to your children before moving on to this one however.Also be prepared - just because my little ones liked the book doesn't mean your own will.If I was six years old I have to admit someone would have to force me to read this - then again one could view this as the least painful way of preparing your children for things they're going to end up learning in school anyways.The books are quite effective too - I was amazed at how much my 6 year old remembered from the Me and My Amazing Body book.

UPDATE - My kids are now 5 and 8 years old and are still fascinated by this book... my theory is that knowing how much things weigh, how tall they are , how big they are et cetera lets them get a "handle" or "grasp" on the world around them by being able to measure it - something us older folk take for granted and find stone cold boring but something that might, in fact, be fascinating to younger folk learning about the concept for the first time.My 8 year old went over weights and measures the previous year in first grade and I'm sure this book helped her out a lot as she was familiar with the concepts before they started teaching them to her in school. ... Read more

Product Description
The Most Comprehensive Conversion Factor Book in the World! This book sets a new standard for accurate, user-friendly conversion factor references. Specifically designed for engineers, scientists, teachers, students, maintenance, construction and industrial workers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Essential Desk Reference
As a person working professionally in metrology (the science and practice of measurement) for over 30 years, I was both astonished and pleased to discover this book on a client's bookshelf, and immediately purchased one for myself. It is absolutely the most comprehensive measurement conversion reference I have ever seen. It even has a list of what measurements are NOT included because of insufficient verifiable data! I highly recommend this book to anyone who has a need to convert measurements, and I commend the authors for another excellent product.

Incidentally, the title initially caught my eye because I'm an occasional contributor to the bimonthly "Measure for Measure" column in ASQ's monthly magazine "Quality Progress" ([...]).

measure for measure
I purchased this small book basically for the fun of it.It has much information but is very small print.

Great companion to Glovers Pocket Ref
Now that I have this book, I don't have to search the world over every time I want to convert some measurement.The format is easy to use and well formatted.A great volume to have for anyone who needs to convert units and can't remember all the formulas.

Almost all you'll ever need
This work is seriously comprehensive, although you may occasionally need a calculator, as suggest by another reviewer. But you'll have the calculator with you anyway, because you're looking in the book to do a conversion. That's what happens to me.

There is a depth of research in this book that I love. You can dive in and discover versions of a unit that you never knew existed (e.g., no, not just the two different feet in use in the US, but all the variants on the angular measure known as the 'mil'). You need to do the work: the authors give you all the basic data.

Most of this book you (as one individual) will never need. But there are enough people who will, collectively, need all of it, to justify this book being in print almost forever. The price is right to have it on your bookshelf and it should last you a lifetime. Go for it!

A valuable reference work, with one flaw
I thoroughly enjoyed hunting in this book for various conversion factors, and would recommend it with just one reservation.

Unfortunately, the authors were somewhat arbitrary in deciding which units any particular one would be converted to. If I had written this book, I would have included at least the following for each unit: (1) All other units in the SAME system (i. e., if we are talking about a pre-revolutionary French unit of length, all other pre-revolutionary French units of length)and (2) the nearest-sized SI unit. Unfortunately they frequently leave out conversions between units of the same system that would be useful, and often units of the same approximate size are converted to different SI units, making comparisons difficult. (For example, one foot-size unit may be expressed as so many centimeters, while another as such a fraction of a meter.)

Both of these omissions can be circumvented by using a calculator and working with what these authors have chosen to include, but the book would be easier to use if they had done what I would have. ... Read more

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Product Description
Originally published in 1912.This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies.All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (10)

Well, mostly about the title topic...
I generally enjoyed this exploration of the various scholarly controversies surrounding the historical accounts of Eratosthenes' calculation of the earth's circumference millenia ago.As a math teacher with a general interest in ancient history and its impact on the development of mathematics, this book was what I was hoping for.

I withheld the fifth star because while I recognize the need to set a social context for the events described, I thought this section of the book ran long without adding as much as I had hoped to my understanding of the specific problem at hand or of the man who solved it.

That said, I'm glad I read it.

Spanning the Globe
In this book the writer tries to do something very hard-- produce a good read about a subject that is worth a book, but has been treated unkindly by history. For Eratosthenes is worth more notoriety, notwithstanding how often his famous earth-measuring experiment is repeated in schools. I'm with Nicastro on this point: scientists like Eratosthenes are more important to our modern world than figures like Helen of Troy, of whom we know almost nothing but who seem to get a new book every week. "Circumference" is an easy read, despite some of the more difficult (and strange) concepts adhered to by the ancients. I don't agree with the reviewer who complains that he didn't explain exactly how an astrolabe works...for every reader who'd be pleased with a long explanation of that obsolete instrument, ten would be bored to death. True, this is not a scholarly book. It's better than that, because it challenges laymen and scholars to do better in understanding the legacy of Eratosthenes.

Extremely Disappointing
I purchased this book after seeing it recommended in History magazine, and I was extremely disappointed with it.I was looking for a book that provided a clear chronological story of attempts to measure the globe.This book was not it.The author spends the first half of the book trying to write a biography of Eratosthenes, about whom almost nothing is known.He therefore pads the book by describing his own trip to Egypt and spends pages conjecturing about boring topics such as what Eratosthenes meant when he used the word "philologos" to describe himself.The second half of the book was more interesting in that the author describes various attempts to measure the earth.However, here he is frustratingly lean on details.For example, I was fascinated to read about Al-Biruni's attempt to measure the circumference of the earth using only an Astrolabe and standing on a mountain top.How did he do it?I still don't know!The author writes "The details need not detain us here" and provides no helpful diagrams or explanations of his methodology.

This book does not do a good job of explaining ancient attempts to measure the globe and does not weave a cohesive, interesting story.It is full of random topics that have to do with the time period of Eratothenes and is also full of the author's own personal opinions about global warming, evolution, and myriad other topics which distracted from the book and showed a chronic inability to focus.The book did make me curious to learn more about Hellinistic history, ancient Greek astronomers, and explorers in the Age of Discovery, but the book itself was very frustrating and unsatisfying.

Nicastro at his best
Nicholas Nicastro is, hands down, my favorite contemporary historical/historical-fiction writer!
This book is a stellar addition in his ever-growing catalogue of excellence.It's a must read!

Fact-filled fiction - and worthwhile
Nicholas Nicastro has created a most interesting work although it does drift well beyond what the reader of the book's cover might have been expecting. The genre of 'historical fiction' is broad and is fraught with pitfalls, some of which the author has inevitably tripped into including some excursions into places which really aren't relevant to the topic at hand.

Notwithstanding, this book will provide the undeterred reader with a wealth of background information which has been well-considered and which can form a basis for further study in tangential areas. It's an interesting little work and worth taking the time/energy to read. ... Read more

Product Description
Reference for those in the jewelry trade who need to estimate weights of gemstones set in jewelry.Includes formulas to estimate weights of 75 shapes of gemstones of all varieties, as well as easy-to-use tables for most of the common shapes.It has become the industry standard. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great complete book
This book is all I hoped that it would be and more.It enables me to quickly determine the type of cut of the gemstone.And from there, determine how many carats in the gemstone.I highly recommend this book. ... Read more

Product Description

This book teaches readers the difference between mass and weight.

... Read more