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!
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
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.