A Tale of Two Feet
oceanservice.noaa.gov
oceanservice.noaa.gov
Another difference: which is heavier, a pound of gold or a pound of feathers? The pound of feathers.
The feathers are weighed using a system called “avoirdupois”: this is how we weigh things like food, equipment and ourselves. Precious metals like gold and silver are measured using the “troy” system. If you normalize everything to mass a pound of feathers is 454 grams and a pound of gold is 373 grams, therefore the feathers are technically heavier
* https://www.suse.com/c/want-pound-feathers-pound-gold/
Now, which is heavier: an ounce of gold or an ounce of feathers? The ounce of gold.
> Precious metals such as gold and silver, and gemstones, are measured in troy ounces. Everyday measurements (food, copper, your body weight) are measured in avoirdupois ounces. A troy ounce (12 to a troy pound) is about 10 percent heavier than an avoirdupois ounce (16 to an avoirdupois pound). When converted metrically, a troy ounce weighs 31.1 grams and an avoirdupois ounce is equal to 28.35 grams.
* https://www.coinworld.com/news/us-coins/what-is-heavier.html
See:
I had presumed this would end with the classic joke: "the pound of feathers, because you have to live with what you did to those birds".
Obligatory Limmy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2oke5MFg
So they already provide meters, which even according to them is real international standard, but also provide a "bad" foot definition for historical reasons. Instead of just scrapping sft and providing just meters like many other countries, they're shifting from sft to ift, even though ift too should be scrapped for the meter.
Not to mention during the transition from sft to ift it may result in errors and or costly updates, when these systems already support the meter, and it is less likely to result in type confusion.
NOAA needs to justify why they're ADDING ift in 2023 rather than just scrapping sft?
Like it sound backward to say stuff like "I'm 5 feet tall, but I can see as far as 20 inches! Maybe I can also count up to twenty teeth but I have only 5 toenails of time remaining".
Ok I exagerated a bit, but to the rest of the world that's how silly this all sound lol
Isnt it weird we all measure prices in USD between non US people when we need to compare price across countries, but the US cant use the meter, a unit so old and basic they re the one country left without it...
apparently also Liberia - a country set up by Americans - and Myanmar still use imperial
The commonly-used U.S. customary units are inch, foot, yard, mile (distance); ounce, pound, ton (mass); teaspoon, tablespoon, ounce, cup, pint, quart, gallon (volume). I only see the foot there as a body part.
(Also for time the hour, minute, day, week, month, and year are not based on powers of ten, but the U.S. does share these and the SI second with the rest of the world.)
There are lots more weird and obscure U.S. customary units that are rarely used by most people, like for length (link, chain, rod, furlong, league), but I'm still not thinking of anything else named after a body part!
I wouldn’t call that a unit, though, as it is scales with the size of the patient’s fingertip (https://dermnetnz.org/topics/fingertip-unit).
Wikipedia-ing around, I knew about "hand" for measuring the height of horses, and had heard of "finger" in the context of "a finger of whiskey". It was apparently a unit of measurement too.
The "digit" Wikipedia entry mentions "finger (7/6 digit), palm (4 digits), hand (16/3 digits), shaftment (8 digits), span (12 digits), cubit (24 digits) and ell (60 digits)" as body-part-based measures - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_(unit)#Britain
I once read a paper that had mixed units (unfortunately common in my field), and the author was very lazy about throwing the words ton and tonne around with zero care. I had to carefully examine every instance of the word with it's context to make sure I was getting the right information. I still haven't quite recovered from that experience.
“It’s about 30 mins on the subway, etc”
Giving miles for distance between things in dense metros is worthless for people who want to know how long it will take to get somewhere.
What is car centric is giving distances between far apart cities in miles. That’s only meaningful for someone with a car who knows how fast they can drive roughly on the highway.
So if someone were to say the next big town over is 4 hours away, I can do some simple mental math and understand it's 260 miles away give or take.
A standard foot corresponds to EU shoe size 48 - woe be upon the person who goes shoe-shopping with thus Goliath feet.
Then there's the randomness on how super- and subunits seem to be randomly defined (1 foot apparently is a third of a yard (which is a stupid unit name in itself, because otherwise, yard defines an area, which is much larger than around a meter), but 12 inches.
This being a stupid situation is something Europe has understood already in the 18th century, which led to unifying to rational - metric and eventually SI - units.
I assume you're referring to an enclosed plot of land. That has a different etymology than the unit, which comes from a word meaning stick or staff.
So, if everyone from your grand-grandfather to your dad use measures like 3/8 and not 0.375, feet and inches instead of meters and centimeters, etc, you naturally use them, too. All the books have them. All the public displays have them. There is just too much inertia that makes everyone keep using them.
You of course can use metric units (most rulers in my home have both inches and mm, every bottle or carton has the volume in oz/gal and ml), 24-hour clock scale (call it "military time"), Celsius temperature scale, etc. If you do science, you most likely use metric units. The metric system coexists with the imperial system, but does not dominate over it.
For example, measuring a third of something in decimals would be 0.333... while in fractions that would be 1/3. Fractions are particularly popular in the construction industries for this reason, where base 12 math will toss out anyone who tries to be metric and base 10.
I mean you have to either handle numerical error or rational numbers. In any case fron a numerical analysis pov, it's a pain
The reason is well known.
American exceptionalism.
Personally I've just given up on the USA dropping anything legacy for international standards.
Things will only get worse, as this example clearly shows.
I’m sure Celsius users have their own mental mapping for that, but it‘s not going to be simple 10 degree bands.
On the level of comfort and dress, looking at a ±10°F as a change of clothing type corresponds reasonably closely to viewing ±5°C in the same way. Seems like, while there is a familiarization period, its not likely to be any less convenient long term.
On the other hand, give it another generation and the UK will be in a worse position than the US’ today…
It’s a market we’re trying to break into, and coming from a European perspective it’s maddening, trying to build simpler apps is complicated enough when dealing with coordinate systems without the addition of multiple definitions of feet and trying to make sure the right one is selected by the user is especially important when dealing with cm accurate products
until the NOAA and NIST have the power to rewrite all the zoning laws (at the federal, state, and local levels) that say roads must be X feet wide, or structures must be set back X feet from the property line, or utilities need to be buried X feet away from something, the reports that surveyors produce will need to include measurements in feet (or at the very least, there needs to be an official conversion factor between metres and feet, which is what is being discussed here).
Then again, feet vs US feet is something you get very aware of very quickly as soon as you're working with geographic data. It's just that sometimes folks garble metadata and you're left with something that claims to be one, but is therefore offset from it's real location by large distances, and if you don't have things to compare it too, it can be very hard to detect incorrect metadata.
Either way, us feet are going to be with us for a long time. E.g. we still have (rare) things like "German meters" too. (Edit: I was thinking of vertical datums and Swiss maps, not German.)
The core issue is that when you are working with coordinates with absolute values in the millions, tiny differences in basically identical standards really accumulate.
That's... an interesting way of stating a range in an article about precision and units of measurement.
FYI, the NFL and the NCAA agree on the dimensions of the “inbounds” area, but not on the dimensions of the “field”
https://operations.nfl.com/the-rules/2022-nfl-rulebook/#plan...
http://www.ncaapublications.com/p-4648-2022-ncaa-football-ru...
But basically, the "international foot" IS the foot. It's the foot you use everywhere, except in US surveying. Calling it the "international" foot in a sense is just picking an arbitrary way to explicitly disambiguate against "US survey foot".
My family has been involved with surveying on-and-off for ~100 years. I hated grabbing measuring tapes as a kid, because the "foot" or the "inch" was always sone batshit crazy thing. Like: decimal foot based on a 30cm foot; the "inch" is 3cm.
Cast metal shrinks when it cools and solidifies. To make patternmaking tolerable, shrink rules are scaled up by the shrinkage allowance so that 5" in the pattern doesn't have to be scaled by the patternmaker to some random measurement. Unfortunately, the shrink allowance varies among metals...
A steel framing square also has some completely cursed scales. I'm not a carpenter, and I won't even pretend to know why anyone needs inches graduated into 10ths or 12ths.
I wish we’d just switch too already.
Consider it an international standard used for working with the United States.
Well if we're being pedantic, it's 5280/499999 feet per mile, or 1/499999 feet per foot.
Is it 1/2 foot or 1/2 feet?
That video explanation pauses for 10 seconds every 5 seconds of playback for me, which makes the content almost useless.
The entire government can be their clients, so they can efficiently reuse stuff they’ve developed.
The UK government has done this I believe (I’m not entirely sure how it’s setup, but I do remember them publishing a UI toolkit that didn’t just look good but covered accessibility properly), and I think every govt should be doing it going forward.
The UK one: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit...
But parent's comment doesn't make sense. The video file is only 1.2mb in size and it's already being hosted on a Azure's object storage: https://aambpublicoceanservice.blob.core.windows.net/oceanse...
I think the native HTML5 video player just doesn't preload as much video and maybe his connection was spotty.
A decimal is an alternative notation for a fraction.
Not near the east coast. US property is measured from a line of reference points near the east coast, so if you use the wrong foot there, your property boundaries will be less than 1mm wrong, and you and your neighbour are unlikely to notice. But near the west coast you may be building your house/fence/whatever 0.5m into your neighbour's land.
Suppose your neighbour has a 30×30m corner plot and you build a five-story building 50cm onto your neighbour's plot. The street isn't going to move, so you've just reduced the size of his possible six-story building by about 2%, and 2% of the value of a six-story downtown building is worth a lawsuit.
But changing the definition of the unit whilst keeping it the same is a very pragmatic solution if they want to converge on the 'normal' foot. Software displays stuff with the right units, values which are old are probably close enough to be correct if just used directly, and anything large enough for the transformation to need to be applied will be hopefully rare enough that it can be calculated and applied with ease.
You’ve now raised the possibility that someone who starts being educated in the field a few years down the line, and never used the old foot at all, will look at old data with SFT measurements and assume they are IFT and introduce all sorts of errors in their analyses and calculations.
You’ve gone from 2 distinctly named standards with a 3x difference in value, which meansa mental sanity check should be sufficient to identify errors in most cases, to introducing a 3rd that is named very much like 1 of those and is close enough in value that a mental sanity check will not get you anywhere in most cases.
Once they get left behind maybe a politician will finally propose to "modernize" the whole thing but feh... the US will drag this crap for centuries like we still have a completely special keyboard layout in France for reasons no one seem to remember lol
They are old legacy that is clearly suboptimal, but no one wants to change it because it still works and the transition would be costly
A bit like the imperial system
It doesn’t. It is infinitely more deadlocked and slow-moving, mostly by design. Switching to metric wouldn’t be a matter of “a politician” proposing it and 50%+1 of the parliament agreeing. It would be a massive, years-long all-consuming struggle.
I've actually seen an old ex-NASA engineer claim that.
He was not joking.
I root for the chinese communist to be there first then lol
. . . The discrepancy between calculated and measured position, resulting in the discrepancy between desired and actual orbit insertion altitude, had been noticed earlier by at least two navigators, whose concerns were dismissed because they "did not follow the rules about filling out [the] form to document their concerns".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...
Typical government bureaucracy.
It was not the Morton Thiokol engineers who made the decision to go ahead with the ill-fated launch. It was NASA. The engineers, meeting in Utah, communicated two messages from their meeting to their local managers. First, they produced the a formal, abstract result: "With the data available to them, and with NASA knowing as well as they that the design was flawed and that temperature might be a causal factor, the engineers argued that the Challenger ought not to fly so far out of the field database, the firmest evidence available." --Robison, et. al.
https://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html
This fourth-level bullet concluding the slide says that, by the way, the debris that struck the Columbia is estimated to be 1920/3 = 640 times larger than data used in the tests of the model! Thus a better headline would be "Review of Test Data Indicates Irrelevance of Two Models." There is an interesting dynamic to this slide: the headline is an exercise in misdirection, which the text then awkwardly and slowly eviscerates.
https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/pi/2016_2017/phil/...
I had a friend (in Europe) who worked as a mechanic on Apache helicopters in Afghanistan; all of that is in imperial too. He worked as a contractor so had to provide his own tools, but those are all in imperial and essentially useless outside of the US. So he now has an expensive high-quality useless toolset.
Switching manufacturing from imperial to metric is the real challenge. Nuts, bolt, things that have to fit exactly: it's all very banal, but there's a lot of it and switching it all over isn't easy or cheap.
100 links per chain, 10 links per furlong, 8 furlongs per mile. 1 acre = 1 chain x 1 furlong