Cavern in Feet

[Glenn Baddeley]

Hi,

Australia has been fully metric since 1975.  You won't find any
road signs in miles or measurements in ounces or gallons or
degrees fahrenheit out here.

All recent cave surveys are in metres, prior the the mid '70s they
were in feet and inches. Some of the older farmers and land
owners still appreciate being spoken to in terms of yards, acres etc.

We use the international spelling "metre", "litre", etc, just like
the proper English "theatre", "centre" etc.

Wiki has some words to say
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(unit_of_length)
that the foot is standardised in terms of the metre.

Glenn,
Melbourne, AUSTRALIA


At 09:50 PM 23/10/2007 -0400, David A Riggs wrote:
>On 10/23/07, Graham Mullan <graham.mullan at wotcc.org.uk> wrote:
> > Ah but which feet do you use, The international foot or the US survey
> > foot? I gather the latter is 610 nm longer than the former.
> >
>
>Being a nation firmly rooted in science, we've standardized on The
>President's foot, a size 10.5 running shoe - it was his idea!  ;-)
>
>Considering that this difference on the longest shot I'd ever consider
>taking underground is three orders of magnitude smaller than the most
>precise measurement I can make with a fiberglass tape (tenth or
>twentieth foot), I'd say that it doesn't matter for a cave survey
>which foot is used. The difference would account for a total
>cumulative error of less than 4 feet for the entirety of the Mammoth
>Cave survey. Should you really care, you could see from the conversion
>factor in 'useful.h' that Survex uses the International Foot.
>
>src/useful.h:#define METRES_PER_FOOT 0.3048 /* exact value */
>
>- DR
>
>--
>David A. Riggs <david.a.riggs at gmail.com>
>
>--
>Survex http://lists.survex.com/mailman/listinfo/survex