Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> “You never place piles or piers closer than three pier diameters apart. These are 36 feet so they should be nine feet apart and they’re, what? — five feet or something.

I don’t get this - the piers are 36 feet (engineers using feet?!) in diameter so should be 9 feet apart, but that’s not 3x 36.

What do they mean?

View on HN

> engineers using feet?!

Architects for example almost exclusively work in feet in the US. The US construction field is almost entirely imperial.

The highest rates of metric use in the US are in cases where there is a possibility of international crossing/exchange, or if the field is distinctly metric-based. If you work for NASA, it makes sense to use global measurement standards. If you're building a house in Cincinnati, it largely does not matter.

If you're a German working in a store in Würzburg, you're far more likely to speak in German throughout your day. If you're a German working in programming with a bunch of US programmers, you're more likely to be using English when communicating with them. Why don't Germans speak English all the time? Because they don't want to and don't need to.

They meant 36 inches.

Wow. Maybe that’s why it’s falling down. Why aren’t engineers using metric?

America. I had to mentally switch to metric when I moved to Europe and now I have to switch back. Ugh.

Arithmetic continues to work even if you don't use metric units.

The arithmetic doesn’t work though - that was my point.

The arithmetic works, but the units were wrong, that can happen in the metric system too.

Almost impossible I'd say to confuse 1 m with 1 km or 1 mm, but easy to confuse feet with inches as they're much closer in value - the same order of magnitude even. As you can see - since it happened in this article.

I don't think an engineer would confuse inches with feet, and it's a stretch to assume that a newspaper reporter wouldn't confuse m with km.

And what about mm and cm? They are only a factor of 10 apart while inches and feet are 12X apart.

Simply put: i doubt the linked article was written by the engineers responsible.

Construction and civil engineering (in the USA) is still done in feet and inches. All construction materials are sold this way. It would just introduce error to try to plan a building in metric dimensions.

Even in the UK you end up with construction materials at those same sizes. Click the link and tell me how large the following sheet size in feet?

https://www.forestrallshop.co.uk/plywood-london/birch-plywoo...

Comically they apparently also imported our lumber price fiasco.

If the piers are sold in inches, then using metric to describe them is another level of indirection, so might make the chance of error worse. Would you feel safer if he said "The piers are 91.4cm"?

It's amusing to see newspaper stories where they report high precision numbers that are obviously metric conversions like "He drove 62.14 miles to work every day" when the original source said "100km".

The construction tradespeople only use imperial. The engineers could use metric, but then they would have to convert everything. It’s easier to just use imperial from beginning to end. Besides, all construction materials are in imperial. It is so much simpler for the engineers to use imperial. Plus, if they grew up in the USA, the engineers are as comfortable using imperial as you are using Metric.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No way the piles are 36 feet in diameter. I don't think piles that big exist or are feasible, you're usually looking at a couple meters max.

In the USA the construction trade is all done using imperial measurements. If you go into any big box hardware store, the only thing you can find in metric is a few specialty bolts.

It’s a typo. They’re 3 feet in diameter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com