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xtruss · 4 years ago

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America Has Two Feet. It’s About to Lose One of Them.

For decades, U.S. metrologists have juggled two conflicting measurements for the foot. Henceforth, only one shall rule.

Graphic By Eleanor Lutz

— By Alanna Mitchell | August 18, 2020 | The New York Times

How big is a foot? In the United States, that depends on which of the two official foot measurements you are talking about. If it comes as a surprise that there are two feet, how about this: One of those feet is about to go away.

The first foot is the old U.S. survey foot from 1893. The second is the newer, shorter and slightly more exact international foot from 1959, used by nearly everybody except surveyors in some states. The two feet differ by about one hundredth of a foot per mile — that’s two feet for every million feet — an amount so small that it only adds up for people who measure over long distances.

Surveyors are such people. For more than six decades, they have been toggling between the two units, depending on what they are measuring and where.

The toggling does not always work. Michael L. Dennis, an Arizona-based surveyor and geodesist with the National Geodetic Survey, has been cataloging mix-ups with the two feet for years and repairing errors. Last year, he had enough.

“I kept running into these problems with different versions of the foot, and I thought it was ridiculous that this thing had gone on this long,” he said. “So I had this secret desire to kill off the U.S. survey foot, and I’d been harboring that for years.”

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 new, international foot. A handful do not specify which of the two feet should be used. Arizona, for example, is an international-foot state, but when employees with the Federal Aviation Administration or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers or the Park Service measure there, they use the U.S. survey foot.

“There’s a recipe for disaster right there, and I’m getting this all the time,” Dr. Dennis said.

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 Dr. 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.

Michael Dennis, a geodesist with the National Geodetic Society, wants to abolish the U.S. survey foot.Credit...Cassidy Araiza for The New York Times

Other problems crop up when surveyors measure from one state to the next, unaware that the two states use different feet. In some cases, large projects employ international surveying firms whose employees are unaware that America has two feet. Some surveying computer software will not recognize the existence of two feet and even hand calculators usually default to the international foot.

Occasionally, surveyors must use one foot for horizontal measurements and the other for elevations. That happened to Dr. Dennis on an engineering project in Arizona. But while the geospatial software was capable of acknowledging both feet, it would not allow for different feet in different directions. He resolved the problem by converting everything to international feet and massaging the vertical measurements, which ought to have been in U.S. survey feet.

“It’s bad enough that people are worried about getting sued over it or losing clients,” Dr. Dennis said.

And then there’s the problem of knowing which foot is which. Even the National Geodetic Survey gets muddled. In a video about how not to mix up the two feet, it mixed them up. It wrongly said that 2,000 meters was 6,561.67 international feet and 6,561.68 U.S. survey feet, reversing the correct conversions. The error went unnoticed for years until Dr. Dennis watched the video recently as he plotted to kill the old foot. He was mortified.

“This provides yet more evidence of the folly of maintaining two nearly identical versions of the same foot,” he wrote in an email.

Fed up, Dr. Dennis broached the subject of retiring, or deprecating, the old U.S. survey foot with his boss, Juliana P. Blackwell, the director of the National Geodetic Survey. The nation’s geodesists are already in the throes of recalibrating the coordinates of the National Spatial Reference System, which is needed to measure where the U.S. exists geographically. It seemed like a golden opportunity to ask those who measure the nation to shift to one foot instead of two, Ms. Blackwell said.

“It’s one of those things that’s been with you for so long you forget that there’s an opportunity here to make things more accurate,” she said.

Edward U. Condon, then director of the National Bureau of Standards, in the bureau’s vault of weights and measures in 1947.Credit...National Institute of Standards and Technology

So, last April, Dr. Dennis braced for the worst, traveled to Arlington, Va., and told a meeting of the nation’s surveyors that the old foot was on its way out, a casualty of modernity.

“The joke was, the people who knew I was doing this said I need to wear a bulletproof vest,” he said.

To his surprise, the directors of the National Society of Professional Surveyors were in favor of the shift to a single foot. Although the directors don’t have a role in the decision, they wanted to know how their members would react. A poll told them that most support the move. But others consider it akin to blasphemy.

“One thing is, let’s be honest, the actual name, the U.S. survey foot,” said Timothy W. Burch, the society’s president-elect, who is in favor of retiring the old foot. “For unfortunately a lot of Americans, especially in this day and age, anything that has to do with the U.S. and that naming quality being taken away, it’s like we’re under attack. So there is a portion of the country that’s like, No, this is ours, this is what we’re going to keep.”

It’s no surprise that some Americans are reluctant to do away with the old foot, said Robert P. Crease, a philosopher and historian of science at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the author of “World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement.”

“The way we measure shapes our imagination,” he said. “Changing the way that you measure requires changing the imagination, and that’s really difficult. It sounds like a neutral activity but it’s anything but.”

A Step Back in Time

A 1904 engraving plaque indicating the standard meter in the Petit Luxembourg in Paris. Standardized metric units were adopted during the French Revolution. Credit...Chronicle/Alamy (left). A page from a 1963 history of U.S. weights and measures.Credit...National Bureau of Standards/U.S. Department of Commerce (right).

The choice of units of measurement is also laden with history. As settlers began to colonize America, they brought with them measurements from their former countries. These included the English ell for cloth but also the far shorter Dutch ell, the Rhineland rod and the British chain and the Spanish vara for measuring land, the English flitch of bacon and hattock of grain, plus the German quentchen for gold.

By the time of Independence, 100,000 units of measurement were in use, Andro Linklater, a British historian, recounted in “Measuring America: How the United States Was Shaped By the Greatest Land Sale in History.” Opportunities for cheating were rife. Establishing common measurements, and therefore fair trade, became a political imperative.

The first message to Congress by President George Washington, in January 1790, contained a call to lawmakers about the importance of establishing a standard system of weights and measurements. Their solution was to adopt parts of the British imperial system, including the yard. In 1815, a brass yard bar made by the Edward Troughton, a London instrument maker, arrived in the U.S. to become the American standard yard.

By 1850, most states then in the union had received official copies of that yard and the other standards, a bid to make sure that every citizen and enterprise in the nation had equal access to the same units of measurement.

But imperial measurements, while standard, were also arbitrarily derived. The yard, for instance, evolved from the idea that “foure graines of barley make a finger, foure fingers a hande, foure handes a foote,” Mr. Linklater noted. During the reign of Elizabeth I, those 16 fingers per foot became 12 inches and were tripled to make the yard that Mr. Troughton fashioned into a bar for America.

Even as the U.S. government shipped imperial standards across the country, the move to metric was gaining appeal in America and elsewhere, driven by a hunger for ever greater precision and easier replicability. Decimalized metric standards, which were being developed by French scientists at the urging of its National Assembly during the French Revolution, are based on scientific findings rather than folksy norms, and these days units increasingly relate to each other. The meter was originally based on one ten-millionth the distance from the geographic North Pole to the Equator; it is now derived from the speed of light. Volume and mass, in turn, are based on the meter.

By 1866, Congress legalized the use of metric units across the U.S., setting the meter 39.37 inches long, and in 1875, America was among the original 16 signatories of the Treaty of the Metre, which aimed to establish metric standards across the world. America broke with the imperial system of measurement in 1893 and officially adopted metric standards under the order of Thomas Mendenhall, then the superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, the forerunner of the National Geodetic Survey.

An act of Congress in 1866 legalized the use of metric units across the U.S.

That means imperial-sounding measurements are actually derived from metric units. So at that point, the foot became a fraction of a meter. The math works like this: 36 inches divided by 3 feet is a foot, or 12 inches. Divide that by the number of inches in a meter: 39.37. Move the decimal places for ease of calculation and you get one foot is 1200/3937 of a meter, a ratio whose run-on decimal places (0.3048006096….) make it slightly imprecise because the measurement will always need to be rounded.

But the 20th century demanded greater exactitude, for the sake of accuracy as well as for international trade in machine-tooled industrial components.

“We believe that there is romance in precision measurement, and that ability to extend the absolute accuracy of measurement by one decimal place frequently demands as much in ingenuity, perseverance and analytical competence as does the discovery of a new principle or effect in science,” Allen V. Astin, then the director of the National Bureau of Standards, said in a speech to the American Physical Society in 1953.

In 1959, the U.S. redefined the foot to align with international standards, making it exactly 0.3048 of a meter, a difference of two parts per million from the old foot. The new foot became known as the international foot.

The government allowed geodesists and surveyors to keep using the foot of 1893, which became known as the U.S. survey foot, in deference to the historical measurements they relied on, with the understanding that they would eventually embrace the new foot.

One Foot Forward

U.S. Geological Surveyors measuring a baseline near Fort Wingate, N.M., in 1883.Credit...Library of Congress

Whether they embrace the new one or not, the old foot will be obsolete as of Jan. 1, 2023, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the agency within the Department of Commerce with the authority to fix weights and measures for the U.S.

“At that point, we will discourage everyone from using the U.S. survey foot,” said Elizabeth Benham, the institute’s metric program coordinator.

The switch to a single foot, which will be known as either the international foot or simply the foot, is too subtle to require surveyors to purchase new yardsticks or measuring tapes, but it is part of an intellectual retooling among those who, as Mr. Linklater wrote, practice the “masochistic science” of land measurement.

Once, surveyors depended on handwritten deeds or plaques with century-old notes to describe plots of land, said Mr. Burch of the National Society of Professional Surveyors. Later, when Mr. Burch learned the profession from his father in the 1980s, each job felt like its own world, he said.

Today, thanks to global navigational satellite systems such as GPS, every measurement is part of a master global coordinate system. The way Mr. Burch sees it, moving to a single American foot is a small step in the long march toward standardization and precision.

“It’s funny how protective people have gotten over this change,” Mr. Burch said. “It’s just not taking into account that science and technology has allowed us to get that much smarter about this big blue marble we live on.”

As for Dr. Dennis, his successful campaign to get rid of the old foot leaves him feeling that he has made an important contribution to America’s future.

“It’s a victory for, dare I say it, common sense to have uniform standards. Even our founding fathers of the nation knew that it was important,” he said, “and it’s kind of weird that people would argue otherwise today.”

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morganbelarus · 5 years ago

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Boiling point: in Tucson, not everyone is equal in the face of heat

As summers get more intense, people who work outdoors, those on a low income and the elderly face imminent peril

To live in Tucson is to be exposed. The Arizona city unfolds beneath four mountain ranges and a gaping sky, welcoming relentless sunlight. Anything here can be sun-bleached billboards, garden hoses, family photos near windows, laundry left out to dry. Most of the year its a dry heat, and sweat evaporates off skin faster than its produced.

Summertime is different. In monsoon season, heat and humidity steadily increase until a storm breaks. There is no other release. Heat cannot exit from the body, creating a claustrophobic feeling inside the skin. Sweat becomes a vital sign its absence indicates heatstroke.

Not all Tucsonans stand equal in the face of heat. If youre lucky enough to have an office job and a robust air conditioning system, your discomfort will be limited to the walk through a parking lot. But as summers get more intense, people who work outdoors, those on a low income and the elderly face imminent peril.

John Soland, a salesman at a cooler parts store, sees people come in for parts and for shelter. We had a guy that passed away under a tree in front of Walgreens from the heat just a couple weeks ago, he says. I saw him every day. Id hand him cups of water. He just laid down and passed away.

The independent climate research organization recently labeled Tucson the harbinger of dangerous increases in heat and humidity; since 1970 the city has seen the second largest increase of days that feel over 100F (37C). By 2050, Tucson is projected to feel like 105F (40C) or higher for more than a third of the year.

While many Tucsonans have adapted to increasingly hot summers, the materials of our homes and comfort have not. Air conditioning units, evaporative coolers and roofs are breaking down faster than ever before. Even so, the city is growing as people get priced out of California.

For the thousands of registered contractors in Tucson, business is booming. To cash in, these technicians endure hours of exposure every day.

At 4.30am, the sky is dark over Tucson. Leaving town on the highway, darkness stretches out between drivers and twinkling civilization. One pair of lights edges against the engulfing black of Pusch Ridge, a granite leviathan on the north side of town. The headlights belong to Taylor Law, a heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) technician, on his way to replace a condenser. He starts his days early 3am in a race against soaring temperatures.

Around 5am, Law arrives at the upscale planned community of Saddle Brooke, where he is greeted by white hairs in neon, walking their dogs.

At 28, Law has spent most of his adult years outside. Hes white, but his skin is nut brown. Only the hands and the face, though, he says. My wife loves the sunglasses tan. He wears a blue cotton T-shirt with sleeves to his wrists to protect him from the sun and sips from the jumbo Hydro Flask his wife got him. Other technicians keep icy coolers in the backs of their vans and drink Gatorade or Pedialyte to keep their electrolytes up.

A city of Tucson worker covering himself from the sun while working outside. Photograph: Cassidy Araiza/The Guardian

Law likes his job, and is good at it, but hopes to one day move into sales. When asked about his goals, he replies: I want to work less and make more money. On a later job, he takes a short break to admire a clients massive truck and daydream about a toy hauler. Working in these better-off areas, I can see what is possible. The closer I am to money, the more likely itll be that I get there, he says.

He pulls into the driveway and turns off the vans frigid air conditioning before unloading heavy equipment next to the condenser he will replace a five-hour operation he can trim down to three with good planning.

At 6am, the temperature breaks 80F (26C). The birds and mosquitoes have joined Law in the side yard. He looks like the worlds sweatiest orthodontist, working delicately with a thin nozzle of fire. Two pale elderly women pull their golf cart into the garage across the street. They cast a look in Laws direction like theyre happy to be heading indoors, then close the curtains.

Maintenance out here is crucial, Law says of his work. You have extreme heat out here, which beats these units up. But, on top of the extreme heat, you have a lot of run time on these systems. Even keeping your thermostat at 80, your system is going to be running a lot during this time of year.

Extra runtime means systems are apt to break down when Tucsonans rely on them most. Proactive measures help some Tucsonans avoid that uncomfortable position, but can cost hundreds of dollars a year. Instead, many Tucsonans nurse their systems along, replacing or repairing parts as necessary. Then, the resourceful go to parts stores.

Customers fill the parking lot at Arizona Maintenance, waiting for Aribal Benitez to open shop. Some have spent the night with broken evaporative coolers and could not sleep. The sooner they can get the parts they need, the more time they have to work against the rapidly increasing heat.

His cash register features monuments to Tucsonans endurance: pumps covered in mineral deposits like hoary stalagmites, cooler pads transformed into blocks of concrete, each caked with mineral debris that slowed the evaporative cooler until it stopped. The buildup is evidence that these homeowners endured years of discomfort before replacing a part that costs about $20. Benitez sees other homeowners go without cooling until June to keep electric bills down. Tucson is a biweekly town, he explains. Since many wage workers get paid every other week, his store sees more business on payday.

Many customers have lived in Tucson for all or most of their lives, as has a contractor named Scooby, who sources metal roofing supplies directly from Benitezs factory. Scooby is in a rush to get back out. When you work outside, every minute that goes by, it gets hotter, says Benitez.

View from Gates Pass in Tucson on 26 August. Photograph: Cassidy Araiza/The Guardian

By 11am, what little shelter workers had outside is gone. You wear a hat, make sure you cover your face, says Jesus Vasquez, a client who started working on roofs this summer. If he didnt wear a cowl over his neck up to his sunglasses, the sun reflecting off the roof would burn his face until it peeled. We usually tend to wear steel-toed boots. With regular shoes, the bottom starts legitimately melting. He reveals the bottom of his sneaker. The yellow rubber melted through, forming a ridge where his sole poked out.

But this job is good. There are ups and downs. Cloudy days are the ups, he says. In the middle of the day, shade is hard to come by. He has hidden underneath a vent for shelter. If he pushes himself too hard, he could fall off a roof. At the same time, if he turns down a job, there are thousands of other contractors in the city.

If they dont show up, someone else is gonna show up, says Benitez as he pulls on his gloves. From 1.30 to 4pm, the roof is around 120F (50C). For this job, you have to be unconscious, says Benitez. If youre conscious, you wont do this job.

Though heat deaths most impact the elderly and those without homes, heat disproportionately impacts the quality of life in low-income areas.

Gregg Garfin: Someone born in the 1960s is probably turning on that AC earlier and keeping it on later than their parents did. Photograph: Cassidy Araiza/The Guardian

If you lay an extreme heat map over a map of low income areas, its the same map, says Regina Romero, the only major party candidate for mayor of Tucson. These areas suffer from the same urban heat island effect that causes the rising number of heat deaths in Phoenix, where fewer trees and larger swaths of impermeable ground prime areas for heat absorption. In these neighborhoods especially, Tucsonans lean on public spaces like libraries as shelter from the heat.

Gregg Garfin, an associate professor of climate, natural resources and policy at the University of Arizona, points out that heat islands cause night temperatures to rise even faster than daytime ones, and leave less time for Tucsonans homes and bodies to recover. This translates into increased energy use, he says. Someone born in the 1960s is probably turning on that AC earlier and keeping it on later than their parents did.

Though heat islands affect specific areas, climate issues such as water conservation and electric transit options mobilize voters across Tucson. The mayor and city council have been working hard to incentivize water conservation, says Romero. This is nibbling around the edges of the problem.

My vision is to make sure that we have not just a livable community, but a thriving, climate-resilient community, Romero adds. That were investing in climate action; so that we are on our way to planting a million trees by 2030. Romero envisions a walkable Tucson with reliable, affordable, electric transit options so that people want to use our transit system.

shadows

Tucsonans need to believe that this investment is for their quality of life, she says.

At noon in Tucson, the world is eerily still. No people walk on the streets. No cars drive on the road. The chirping birds have returned to nest. The flurries of rabbits have curled up in their warrens. The only movement comes from the hawk circling above, and the slow drift of clouds.

The circulatory system is frantically bailing heat from the body. If Law pauses from his work, he might notice the heartbeat surging under every inch of his skin. Instead, he pushes silently through. Im the type of person to just grunt through pain. I dont know how to slow down, he says. This attitude has caused him advanced back problems that his insurance wont cover. It got to the point where I couldnt tie my shoes.

The Tucson landscape during sunset. Photograph: Cassidy Araiza/The Guardian

At 3pm, he climbs down the ladder for the last time. He collapses the ladder and heaves it over his shoulder, up onto the roof of his van, and drives away.

When the sun goes down, the city can finally relax. Temperatures start to cool in mid-August, when the monsoon breaks and rain pours down. The night after a rain is almost comfortable. Law drives to a date with his pregnant wife, one of the last before their son arrives. The windy roads are unlit and everything is quiet. His car windows are open; the air conditioner is off.

Original Article : HERE ;

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