Why is this some sort of gotcha? A foot could be defined by anything. It could be defined as a meter previously was by the length of a metal bar held at some place. And when a meter is currently defined as the length that light travels in a vacuum for some small fraction of a second, that really isn’t much either. Any system of measurement is arbitrary.
The question is why should we trade ours in for another? For science, engineering, and trade with the international community? Sure. I’m convinced. When I buy salami at the grocer? No need.
There are many possible degrees of metrification here. Were I in charge, I’d take a slightly stronger approach: it should always be legal to provide consumer information in metric only.
This may happen, actually. NIST proposed the change for food items. The reason: the EU did have a proposal to make metric-only mandatory. US exports feared this would increase costs because they would need to sell things in two distinct packages. The EU proposal apparently hasn’t happened but if it does, it’s likely the NIST proposal will get a boost as well.
You seem to be missing that there are two contradictory definitions of the foot both in active use the the US today. And you can only know the difference by context. What’s especially maddening is that the difference is small enough that you’d never notice by eye (say, by inspecting a ruler), but large enough to make a difference in practice.
So your statement “why should we trade ours in for another?” is nonsense; we already have both! We should get rid of one (NIST is already on the case, apparently) at least. But really we should get rid of both.
Is this a real issue, though? If someone tells you that a house is 2000 sq. ft, do you just clutch your head because you aren’t sure if they are talking about surveyor’s feet? Or is this “crisis” invented to make some pitch for the metric system?
And as I know what 2000 sq ft. is and you know what it is, why is it important that we just change that because other people in the world use square meters?
Different municipalities and agencies use different definitions of the foot, and in the context of surveying these differences are enough to cause errors that would negatively impact construction. There is a plan to deprecate one definition to eliminate this issue. You can read more about it here:
While such differences might seem merely philosophical, they can have vital and costly consequences in the real world. In one case, in a certain city that Dennis declined to name, the construction of a downtown high-rise that sat in the approach path to an international airport was delayed while the building was redesigned to be one floor shorter.
This Dr. Dennis apparently has a whole catalogue of these mixups. Apparently even the National Geodetic Survey can’t keep the two straight.
Was there a move to deprecate all use of feet and chains by surveyors that was blocked? Why did they bother to keep one when, in their own words, they had a “second chance to fix this problem”?
That is not how it works, because there is a reproducible (single) international standard meter. Surveyors are not intentionally trying to come up with distorted measurements.
Most states mandate the use of the old U.S. survey foot for their state coordinate systems, which allow surveyors to take into account Earth’s curvature in their measurements. A few states mandate the use of the newer international foot.
I am not a surveyor, of course, but this looks like an issue that could crop up in any system of measurement. Even if surveyors used meters, the states which wanted the slightly shorter surveyor’s unit of measure would then want a “surveyor’s meter.”
No, you’ve misunderstood it. The surveyor’s foot is unrelated to the Earth’s curvature. It’s the state coordinate system which accounts for the Earth’s curvature, and some of those coordinate systems are based on the old surveyor’s foot. It’s only a “surveying issue” because the differences are significant at that scale, but it could be a problem in any industry that demands accuracy to a few parts per million. It’s just that every other industry already converted to metric or at least the international foot. Surveyors are just slow to adapt. NIST is finally forcing the issue in 2022.
I read it again, and your post again, but I still think I am correct. As I read the article, a “regular” foot is good enough for most things. But because in surveying long distances, say half of the state of Wyoming, my measurements would be off because at such a large distance, the curvature of the earth would come into play—so we have the surveyor’s foot. When measuring my back yard, the difference would be negligible and another surveyor might wonder if I used a “regular” foot or a surveyor’s foot.
Now when different states have different standards (and as an aside, this should be a matter for the federal government, even for a 10th Amendment guy like me) it does cause confusion.
But if those states are to retain their preference for an ever so slightly smaller unit of measurement for surveying purposes, then the confusion the author of the article describes would still remain, whether that was in feet, meters, or any other unit.
No, you’re completely wrong about your interpretation. The survey foot arose solely from a decision in 1959 to exempt surveyors from a standardization of the foot. It has nothing to do with the curvature of the Earth, and couldn’t, anyway, because the deviation of a curved path from a straight path is non-linear.
I’ll read some more about this interesting topic and drop the hijack, but it makes intuitive sense. If I measure the outside of a basketball, for example, in straight line measurements, I will be off slightly.
If you have a 1-meter diameter ball, then the straight-line distance between two opposite points is 1 meter, while the curved-line distance is 1.57 meters. However, for a straight-line distance of 1 mm, the surface distance is 1.00000017 mm. The ratio by which you are off is variable and therefore can’t be used to correct for curvature.
It gets even worse on Earth because it’s actually a lumpy oblate spheroid, not a sphere.
Glad you chose Wyoming, since that’s where my surveying takes place. And you are vastly underestimating the impact; it shows up much faster than half a state away.
I didn’t “make up” an issue to sell the metric system… It is a very real issue I personally have dealt with… Most recently in the last few weeks.
The problem is evident in your own ignorance (in the academic sense) of the existence of the problem itself; you aren’t alone in that. There are engineers that don’t seem to be aware of the multiple foot definitions in use in this country. And as Dr. Strangelove said upthread, you wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking at them; the difference is small, but it is real.
So you might think that isn’t a big deal, right? Well, you wouldn’t think that after, say, staking out the setup lines for a concrete foundation for a large-scale energy project using large, prebuilt steel structures intended to bolt firmly onto those anchor foundations… only you find out that the site design engineer provided data with one definition of a foot, while the steel structure engineer designed with a different definition of a foot. And now the footings and anchor bolts don’t line up with the pre-fabricated structures.
How does metric help? Well, a meter is a meter. If I receive metric design data from an engineer, there will be NO error; I know what I’m working in, I know what they are working in. No issues.
Really, in the end, though, all measurements are arbitrary, and just need to be standardized. Our desire to stick with our (frankly idiotic, IMO) imperial system at this point is just another example of American Exceptionalism: “What can work in literally every other country can’t work here!”
ETA: And I don’t mean “ignorance” as a slight… it’s just one of the things MOST people don’t realize (don’t even get me started on latitude/longitude!)… I don’t mean that to be an attack in any sense… I just mean ignorance like I would have regarding ANYTHING in music theory, for example.
I was EE and as an engineering student and then in work, metric was the only way to go. For many professions, switching would definitely be better, but the majority of people, if not the vast majority of people are the ones only reading the labels, and don’t want to make the switch.
Something interesting here in Taiwan is that clothes and patterns are done in metric but the cloth is sold in inches. I have no idea why that is, but when I went with my wife to the fabric store so she could buy 1.5 m of cloth (it comes in a standard width so they just measure the length), they had two measures fastened to the table, side-by-side, the measure in metric then convert for the price.
It didn’t take me that long to get used to it once I moved to Japan and I think any one could if they tried. The problem is getting people to try.
I think it’s one of those things that if they did it, the next generation would be happy, but it’s too politically charged to actually carry it out. While there are benefits to society as a whole, there would be too many people who would punish any political party that pushed it through.
Nitpick on this: the point with length scales is that, since special relativity, we have known that space can be stretched or contracted. The only absolute measure is the (two-way) distance traveled by massless bosons in space.
To put it more simply: any scale used for very precise measurements would need to be defined relative to the speed of light. If feet and inches were used in science and precision engineering, they’d need to be defined relative to the speed of light too.
It’s the one scale that’s not arbitrary.
Even if you don’t see it, it’s causing hassle everywhere the different units are meeting. Changing the units would be painful for a short while but remove all that hassle essentially forever.
I’d file it next to daylight savings. The cost isn’t that big so it limps along year after year. But just abolishing that nonsense would save that cost year after year forever.
The American refusal to adopt the metric system is frankly bizarre to pretty much every other country on the planet. It’s one of those things that’s a bit like taking a sticky plaster off - do it a little at a time and it’s not fun, rip it off quickly and it’s over and you can get on with everything else.
When I previously visited the US for work, the imperial measurements for some stuff were just utterly meaningless. When the waitress asks if I want a 30oz soda with dinner, I simply have no idea without Googling it. What is an ounce? Am I ordering a modest refreshment, or will they wheel a keg up to the table?
I mean, you guys have had decimal currency right from the start; it genuinely surprises me that the obvious benefits of a decimal system haven’t been adopted for measurements, weights, distances etc too.
They are, and they are. The international foot is defined as an exact multiple of the meter, which means it’s defined in terms of the speed of light too. And plenty of precision engineering takes place using feet and inches.
It’s still a dumb system for the lack of coherency and the sometimes multiple definitions of the same unit, but nevertheless precision or lack of a proper definition are not among those flaws.
And for what it’s worth, precision engineering in inches doesn’t use that power-of-two-fraction shit, either. It uses “thou” (thousands of an inch) or “tenths” (ten-thousandanths of an inch).