yurt yurt yurt

I got quite a workout this morning helping my brother put a roof on his new yurt. Hoist hula hoop-sized wooden center ring to top of scaffold, lift forty 15-foot long wooden support beams into place between wall and ring, dismantle and remove scaffold, realize that all beams are upside-down, rotate all beams in place, aaaaaand break for lunch. Good times.

Also it occurred to me that the framework of the yurt would make an excellent statics problem for a basic physics class--analyze all the forces acting on the beams, the cable they're nested on, and the central ring.