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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

They don't really explain WHY.

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?

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land surveys aren't just done for fun, they're done for legal compliance. and if the law you need to comply with requires something to be measured in feet, the surveyor needs to provide a measurement in feet.

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).

This is just a guess, but it's possible that surveyors are so used to measurements in ft that the existing tools mostly use ft (like the GPS in the video), so completely deprecating it might leave surveyors without the tools they need to do their jobs.

I’m pretty sure the GPS tool can be switched to meters by a toggle in the settings.

I'm sure any released in the last 10 years would, definitely. But don't forget that there are probably tons of underfunded rural outfits that are using old tech/out of support software etc. Meeting in the middle is going to make sure they don't get left behind.

In recent conversations i’ve had, plenty of surveyors are just plain old stuck in their ways and simply won’t change.

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

And here I was thinking posting something similar would be read as too pessimistic!

The survey foot is, from what I could tell in the article, already officially defined in meters. It seems that the real complaint about how the US is backward is that we use fractions of whole numbers. The horror!

Not it's more you use body part names that sound funny as unit of measurement.

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...

Pfft, who names a currency after a German valley?? Those hilarious idiots...

there are other countries that still use imperial. Britain officially uses metric, but there’s a lot of imperial in common use. most people will tell you their height in feet and inches and their weight in stones and pounds. you buy pints at the pub and older generations will probably give you estimates of distance in miles

apparently also Liberia - a country set up by Americans - and Myanmar still use imperial

I hope the U.S. will adopt the metric system in day-to-day life (I used to be a member of the U.S. Metric Association), so I'm not disputing your larger point, but I can't think of anything but the foot that's named after a body part.

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!

An obscure one is the fingertip unit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_tip_unit)

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).

hogshead?

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

That is definitely a fair list of body-based customary units; thanks for pointing those out!

Ton ? Long ton or short ton ?

Or metric tonne? Don't worry, the spelling is different, so you can count on that to encode your unit information. Authors of scientific papers always pay attention to proper spelling/ grammar so you'll never have to worry! /s

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.

While we're listing weird American units, don't forget the American tendency to measure any distance greater than about a mile in units of "minutes" or "hours", because of our compulsive car culture.

Alpine hiking trails are also so measured. Once you know how many hours it takes you to walk an hour, you are good to go.

This is how distance is measured in cities with public transit…

“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.

Generally 60 to 80mph, though for reasons of objectivity we usually just use the legal speed limits (which is generally 65mph).

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.

Not sure how its relevat anyway, but that doesn't sound silly to me. Why would have a concrete, relatable equivalent be a bad thing?

It's a bad thing because as it turns out, feet are all kinds of sizes, vary over time both in individuals and in groups, and may have different sizes or averages in different geographical areas. Even the unit foot is different between Indian survey feet, US survey feet, and apparently the international foot. To add extra confusion, there's the ISO 2848's "metric foot" which is exactly 30 cm, which supercedes former "metric feet" of different lengths. If you take old feet into account, a feet can be anywhere between 25 cm and 33.5 cm. What a mess!

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.

> yard (which is a stupid unit name in itself, because otherwise, yard defines an area

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.

Those are problems that have nothing to do with having measurements that can be imagined with concrete analogies. Nobody uses "feet" to mean literally their personal feet. A foot is a standardized unit of measure about the size of a foot. I have no problem with that, that's not an absurd thing to do.

Yes, the US should move to the metric system. There are many reasons, but etymology isn't one of them.

Mathematically, both are fractions of whole numbers (or decimals - the notation makes no difference). The problem is that they're different - which is a problem if you confuse them.

the inch changed in 1959 from exactly 1/39.37 m to exactly 2.54 cm; the survey foot is for compatibility with large-scale measurements based on old inches.

So that's why my windows are leaky! I knew there had to be a reason.

Do you know why that’s popular in the US? I’m so used to the decimal point notation that when hear “the Dow Jones index dropped by one hundred thirty three or one-tenth of a percentage point” on NPR it just throws me off. “Point one percent” is just so much easier to visualize the number. It feels unnecessarily complicated to use the fractional system. Same with the “the time right now is three past five” vs “it’s oh-three-oh-five or three-oh-five pm”.

It's a tradition. The US is more traditional than most of Europe. Its political system did not change for nearly 250 years, and the last major war on its territory ended in 1865. Europe had many more wars during a comparable period, and much more political reorganization. It had many more chances to scrap an old system and enforce a new system. The US federal government won't enforce a metric system, or it would likely be overstepping its mandate.

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.

I do think decimal measurements have become more popular over time, though, even in areas where we haven’t switched to metric. I’m more likely to say something weighs 1.5 pounds than one pound, eight ounces. (On the other hand, we absolutely still use feet and inches ubiquitously).

There are situations where fractions are easier and more importantly more accurate than decimals.

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.

When redefining traditional measuring units into metric, it is generally preferred that the traditional unit equals a terminating decimal number in metric. For example, 1 inch = 25.4 mm exactly. This helps with transitioning to metric because old specifications can be translated to metric without introducing fractions or repeating decimals. The fact that the survey inch is exactly 100/3937 metres violates this property and makes it more cumbersome to work with in metric.

> fractions of whole numbers. The horror!

I mean you have to either handle numerical error or rational numbers. In any case fron a numerical analysis pov, it's a pain

Some explanation: https://www.nist.gov/pml/us-surveyfoot

> NOAA needs to justify why they're ADDING ift in 2023 rather than just scrapping sft?

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.

This is needlessly pessimistic. The US has been, ahem, inching its way towards metrication for decades. It's not a particularly sexy or urgent topic, and it's staunchly opposed by a certain vocal segment of the populace, but industry, academia, and the government (including the military) have been making metric the default (and sometimes the only option) in more and more places. Previously the big win was in requiring consumer packaging to label in both customary and metric; nowadays the big win is that goods themselves are increasingly sold in nice round metric numbers with a customary conversion rather than the other way around. Give it another generation or so and we'll be in no worse a position than Canada or the UK is today.

The only one I’m going to be sad about is going from Fahrenheit to Celsius, outside of the slightly harder to remember water freezing and boiling points, Fahrenheit seems like it has a better UX for weather comfort. Because the scale is spread out more, each 10 degrees corresponds pretty well to a type of dress, whereas a 10 degree swing in Celsius is pretty drastic.

I’m sure Celsius users have their own mental mapping for that, but it‘s not going to be simple 10 degree bands.

> Because the scale is spread out more, each 10 degrees corresponds pretty well to a type of dress, whereas a 10 degree swing in Celsius is pretty drastic.

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.

Yeah, that’s roughly what I was guessing based on the conversion, so just slightly worse on that front. There’s also something aesthetically pleasing about having a normal temperature range that’s essentially 0 to 100, rather than -20 to 40.

Why is -10F not as normal as 0F? Seems arbitrary.

On the flip side, Celsius is well suited to measure weather, because I can actually feel a 1~2°C shift in air temperature whereas 1~2°F is more faint

> Give it another generation or so and we'll be in no worse a position than Canada or the UK is today.

On the other hand, give it another generation and the UK will be in a worse position than the US’ today…

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