15 ms·
Multistate Disagreement over the Length of the Foot to End
- turbonaut 6y agoWhilst standardisation is obviously important, the article references an anecdote where a building had to lose a storey due to the usage of the ‘wrong type of foot’. This does not seem overly plausible given the error would be <2mm over the height of the Burj Khalifa.
- wcoenen 6y agoIt was likely the measurement of the distance between the airport and the building that was the problem. edit: thinking about it, it still doesn't make sense. The difference in distance would be about 2 cm over 10 km.
- turbonaut 6y agoIndeed, even if you were Elon Musk, building a space elevator to ISS and you used the wrong type of foot, you’d only be 80cm out.
- chrisseaton 6y agoThink about the error in the distance of the building to the airport, not the error in the height. You can imagine how that error in the distance could be a few feet, which would take the build height into a category of maximum height that was many feet lower. The error in the height is irrelevant in this case.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Aardwolf 6y ago"international foot" Almost every other nation uses the meter.
- r_singh 6y agoIndia uses foot (that's 15% of the world by population)
- capableweb 6y agoEverywhere I read (including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_India) says that India is using the metric system since somewhere around ~1960.
- r_singh 6y agoCheck the last paragraph of the link you've submitted. You can see the word feet used there many times, suggesting that "feet" is used to measure a lot of things and is the most commonly used while describing a property from a real estate perspective.
- Mountain_Skies 6y agoI've never had a person from Canada or the UK tell me their height in meters. Never heard anyone from either country give their weight in kg. Both countries are metric but still have lots of imperial in their daily lives. Wouldn't be surprised to find other local measurements around the world sitting next to the international metric standard.
- cpcallen 6y agoOr you could solve this problem by switching to metric...
- capableweb 6y agoIs US's consistent refusal to adopt something more common like the metric system the ultimate display of "Not invented here" syndrome? (I know imperial was invented by the British, but it's largely just the US left using it) Feels like everyone would be better off if the switch just happened already, as it'll happen one day or another. But they keep on fighting it off, for some reason. Or does the imperial system have some advantage over metric (not including the fact that everything in the US is already using imperial) that makes it infeasible to change?
- jacobolus 6y ago> In 1793, Thomas Jefferson requested artifacts from France that could be used to adopt the metric system in the United States, and Joseph Dombey was sent from France with a standard kilogram. Before reaching the United States, Dombey's ship was blown off course by a storm and captured by pirates, and he died in captivity on Montserrat. More seriously, blame the Reagan administration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...
- capableweb 6y agoThanks for that link! Seems to outline that there has been many attempts, some still ongoing, but not making a lot of progress. Seems weird to fault all of these failed attempts to the Reagan administration, but I guess that's also an American thing to do, attribute issues to one group of people, not the one you're in, but "the other group".
- chrisseaton 6y agoIs it just older people in the US who want to keep using customary units? Does the younger generation use metric and they'll switch over time? I don't think I'd have the mental arithmetic required to calculate things in terms of sixteenths!
- iNerdier 6y agoIt’s just a hassle to switch things when you have a large number of people who have adopted it. Even the UK which is nominally metric hasn’t had the will to switch from miles to kilometres for road speeds and distances. The slow spread of globally used volumes is probably the only way it’s ever going to happen and even there it won’t affect most areas. There does also seem to be a more extreme reluctance in the US to change to more widely adopted units and conventions (e.g. day/month/year) and if anything being one of the only countries left using non metric units seems to be a point of pride. About the only SI units the us seem to use relate to fields invented after science as a whole adopted it as standard (e.g. electrical units). In one sense inches have a pleasant form of being subdivided into more easily divisible Power of two units but even that falls apart over small distances where they turn to ‘thousandths of an inch’ rather 1024ths. Useful in a world of pre-computer drawing because you could easily scale up plans but not particularly useful now.
- ghaff 6y agoThere does seem to be a particular reluctance in the US to change things "because everyone else does it this way." It even goes beyond that though. Although this is on its way to becoming a largely academic point, the US also hasn't changed the bills and coins in common circulation for probably close to 100 years. We still have a penny, the dollar coin didn't take off (which I'm actually fine with as I prefer a bill for a $1-$2ish denomination), and you still can't count of being able to use $100 bill at a random store in the US.
- toyg 6y agoEveryone in US uses feet and inches, afaik.
- s_tec 6y ago
- tgv 6y agoAnd of course, both kind of foot are defined in meters.
- unnouinceput 6y agoHow about the inch. I know when you say your height, in US, you use feet + inches. And inch is defined also in regards to meter (2.54 cm) but also in regards to foot (12 inches == one foot). The what kind of foot is used, and does the inch then varies in length as well?
- shawnz 6y agoThere have been many different standards for both inches and feet. What this article calls the "international foot" is based on the 2.54cm inch.
- masklinn 6y agoThe issue here is the surveyor's foot, which as its name indicates is only used for surveying (and corresponds to the pre-metrication foot). That's like nautical miles. If you're in a nautical context "mile" can be ambiguous, but if you're not then it's just the mile (well except there's also a survey mile). Anyway the answer to your question is that in 1959 all non-metric units of length (and weight) were standardised internationally and defined in terms of metric units. So outside of specific contexts (like surveying), an inch is 2.54cm and a foot is 12 inches of 2.54cm or 30.48cm. The "reference" unit is actually the international yard at 91.44cm, with there being 3ft to a yard, and 12in to an ft.
- classified 6y agoThis is ludicrous. Can we switch to the metric system already?
- corty 6y agoMeanwhile the SI refined its definitions further in the last few years, making it transferable to our possible future alien overlords from outer space. I really cannot fathom how such an inconsistency as the disagreement over a unit that is nonstandard, weird and custom anyways could be allowed. The rest of the world got its act together roughly 200 years ago, admittedly with some leftovers, but those vanished over time...
- mcv 6y agoSo the US finally standardises on a single international standard for distance, and they standardise on feet? This while confusion over different types of feet is the entire reason why the metric system caught on like a wildfire. Before the metric system, every city used to have its own foot. Most, not all, were 12 inches, but they also all had their own inch.
- buboard 6y agoThe metric system sends thoughts and prayers
- protomyth 6y agoShould switch the foot to a light-nanosecond so all those quick engineering estimates could be the actual length.
- kbaker 6y agoJust because I needed to look it up: - 1 International Foot = 0.3048 m - 1 US Survey Foot = 1200/3937 m ~= 0.3048006096 m - 1 light-nanosecond ~= 0.2998 m
- exabrial 6y agoWhy not use the meter?
- vikramkr 6y agoJust not worth the effort to switch. What do we gain that's worth getting everyone to relearn everything? We already use metric where it matters.
- vikramkr 6y agoLot of "why not metric" comments. Heres what I think is the main reason: it's just not worth the effort. The US isn't missing out on tangible benefits from not standardizing with the rest of the world. Where it matters in science, we already use metric. Day to day, who cares? Why go through all the trouble to switch? You need people to retrain with a new system, retool signs and equiptment, and so on. It's just not worth it to be able to divide units by 10 more easily, especially when the system we already have is full of powers of 2 or 12 which are frankly a bit easier to divide with day to day (1/3 of a foot is 4 inches, while 1/3 of a meter is 33.33333333.... centimeters). It's just not worth the hassle.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoMy physics teacher at school told us many times how lucky we were not to have to work in imperial. I'll take his word over yours. There's a midpoint between science and day-to-day (engineering). Anyway, if you want the US to continue its decline, such a can't-be-bothered attitude will help. Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter "However, on September 23, 1999, communication with the spacecraft was lost as the spacecraft went into orbital insertion, due to ground-based computer software which produced output in non-SI units of pound-force seconds (lbf·s) instead of the SI units of newton-seconds (N·s) specified in the contract between NASA and Lockheed." Some people don't learn.
- vikramkr 6y agoWho in physics works in imperial? Research is solidly metric in the US. The mars orbiter loss was due to a failure to perform the necessary checks etc to make sure the mission was on track. Continue reading the section about the failure report. The discrepancy had been noted by humans and had been brought up, but the concerns were ignored because they failed to fill out the correct paperwork, and NASA takes responsibility for the loss, and does not blame lockheed.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago> Who in physics works in imperial? Research is solidly metric in the US. The Mars Climate Orbiter was a research vehicle, no? It wasn't expected to make money I'm sure. > was due to a failure to perform the necessary checks etc Which would have been unnecessary had they both used the same units. > and NASA takes responsibility for the loss, and does not blame lockheed. I did not mention blame, why did you bring that up? Point is, had they used the same units this failure mode would have been closed off.
- citizenpaul 6y agoPretty much every house in the US is built on imperial. Unless everyone in the country wants to tear down their house and rebuild for solely the purpose of moving to the metric system then there will Imperial stuff tools manufacturing and such pretty much forever. Cars and machinery are Imperial as well but they have much lower lifetimes than houses. I remember reading somewhere that just changing speed limit signs would cost more than 100 Billion to change and that was a modest estimate. I wish I could find where they did the math.