
Multistate Disagreement over the Length of the Foot to End - danso
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/multistate-disagreement-over-the-length-of-the-foot-to-end/
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capableweb
Is 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?

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Theodores
Customary Units and Imperial measurements are bad, we all know that. However,
play Devils Advocate for a moment to see the benefits of these allegedly
backwards measurements. Take the foot. This is twelve inches. You can divide a
foot into thirds or sixths without any recurring numbers. This is of practical
application.

If you are working with some DIY task and everything is in Imperial
measurements then it all works out as easy as Lego pieces.

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ithkuil
Yeah, duodecimal systems (base 12) rock! But is the customary units system
consistently duodecimal? Iirc it's not, but I might misremember.

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jabl
No. E.g. a foot is 12 inches, but a yard is 3 feet.

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masklinn
And a chain is 22 yards and a furlong is 10 chains and a mile is 8 furlong
(which is why a mile is 1760 or 5280 feet.

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turbonaut
Whilst 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.

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wcoenen
It 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.

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turbonaut
Indeed, 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.

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classified
This is ludicrous. Can we switch to the metric system already?

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unnouinceput
How 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?

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masklinn
The 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.

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vikramkr
Lot 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.

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throwaway_pdp09
My 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.

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vikramkr
Who 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.

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throwaway_pdp09
> 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.

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Aardwolf
"international foot"

Almost every other nation uses the meter.

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r_singh
India uses foot (that's 15% of the world by population)

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capableweb
Everywhere 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.

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r_singh
Check 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.

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chrisseaton
Is 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!

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unethical_ban
I'm a big fan of converting to Celsius. It would probably be the cheapest
thing to switch to.

Kilometers? We have more than four million miles of road in the US, and lets
rough-guess at the VERY least two speed signs each mile, one each direction.
The real number on average is probably double that.

Then there are "mile markers" and every freeway sign that lists distance by
miles.

Then there are cars that don't have highly visible kM speedometer markings.

Specific industries may shift to metric, and surely things like surveys
probably could. But the total conversion? I would bet on many structural
changes in the United States before that ever happens.

Voting reform, Constitutional amendments, DC and PR statehood, banning reality
TV, all seem more likely than moving to metric.

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ghaff
Honestly, there's probably less justification in switching to Celsius than
other units. Pretty much the only place Fahrenheit really falls down is that
it's different from the rest of the world--and the vast majority of Americans
are not exposed to that difference on a day to day basis.

Yes, you need to remember what the rather arbitrary seeming freezing and
boiling temperature of water are, but that's not a big deal. And you actually
get a finer grained measurement system without resorting to decimals. And
you're less likely to need negative numbers for ordinary temperatures. (And,
if you do, you know it's really really cold.)

Finally, while the Celsius degree size is used in a lot of technical
calculations, the absolute scale isn't usually. Kelvin is used instead. So if
anything were the "right" unit to use it would be Kelvin, but that would be
fairly obviously silly for day to day use.

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kergonath
In my field of research (condensed matter Physics and Thermodynamics), the
split between Kelvin and degrees centigrades is about 50%. Anything that gets
in contact with industry tends to use °C for some reason.

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ghaff
When I was doing material science (long time ago), as I recall we'd obviously
use Kelvin for calculations where you needed to use an absolute temperature
scale. But if we were just stating an annealing temperature or something like
that, we'd use Celsius.

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protomyth
Should switch the foot to a light-nanosecond so all those quick engineering
estimates could be the actual length.

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kbaker
Just 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

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tgv
And of course, both kind of foot are defined in meters.

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mcv
So 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.

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cpcallen
Or you could solve this problem by switching to metric...

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corty
Meanwhile 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...

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citizenpaul
Pretty 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.

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buboard
The metric system sends thoughts and prayers

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exabrial
Why not use the meter?

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vikramkr
Just 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.

