Out of the Office

I'll be out of the office for a few days and won't have a chance to update the Blog. I will return soon...

Book Down : The Measure of All Things

I finished up the book The Measure of All Things. Interesting read on the history of the metric system. The last chapter speaks about the adoption of the metric system over the past 200 years and the difficulties of incorporation into any given society. Thoughtful quote from the last chapter

"America, in Jefferson's terms, has preferred to mold the law to its citizens, rather than its citizens to the law - at least where commercial interests are at stake"

From the standpoint of the USA, that is a unique quality of the country in how we progress and as Ken Alder argues, one of the reasons why the US stands alone in the world to the meter. While many bemoan the globalization of economy, especially those in Europe, the US refuses to globalize it's system of weights and measures.

Worth the read - a bit slow in parts, but thought provoking.

Easter!

Happy Easter! He is Risen!


He is Risen indeed!

Hats off to the Pilot

(Not Survey Related - NSR)
This is some pretty good flying by the pilot considering the crosswind conditions...

Going Metric

I had always assumed that the meter and metric system was a development of the late 1800’s or early 1900’s, but it turns out, that the USA narrowly missed going metric from the very beginning of the nation…

From the beginning, the French had expected America-their sister republic-to be the first country to join the metric system. They had been delighted when Jefferson dropped his preference for a pendulum standard at the 38th parallel (near Monticello) in place of a standard at the 45th (near Bangor, Maine), clearing the way for trilateral Franco-British-American cooperation. In 1792 a committee of the United States Senate even recommended this pendulum standard as the national unit of length. But when the French savants switched to a meridian standard that traversed France alone, Jefferson became convinced that the French show of internationalism was a sham. Congress put off any consideration of the legislation.

The French did not give up so easily on America, however. Soon after the passage of the metric law of 1793, they dispatched the naturalist-explorer Joseph Dombey to convey the new (provisional) standards to the United States in the form of a copper meter stick and a kilogram weight. In January 1794 Dombey set sail from Le Havre on the American vessel The Soon. Unfortunately a storm drove him to the Caribbean, to the fractious French colony of Guadeloupe. From there, his mission went from bad to worse. Local plantation owners imprisoned Dombey as an emissary of the radical Jacobin government. Released upon threat of violence by those loyal to Paris, he disguised himself as a Spanish sailor and boarded a Swedish schooner, only to be captured by British corsairs and escorted to the prison island of Montserrat. There he died of illness in April.

Miraculously; Dombey's papers and the precious copper meter and kilogram weight arrived safely in the United States (where they are Still preserved in the Museum of the National Institute of Standards And Technology) and the French ambassador took up Dombey's mission With enthusiasm. Ambassador Fauchet said he was delighted to learn of The metric reform and expressed his confidence that "an enlightened And free people would receive with pleasure one of the discoveries of The human mind, the most beautiful in theory; and the most useful in application." By this he meant the French people. He also hoped the adoption of the metric system in America would "cement the political and commercial connexions of the two nations." His hopes were echoed in newspaper editorials urging all Americans-or at least, all educated Americans – to adopt the rational French measures voluntarily.



For a time, success seemed within reach. Fauchet was friendly with President Washington, who was friendly toward France, and the President asked Congress to reconsider the metric system. Washington had stressed the great importance of uniform measures in all three of his earliest State of the Union addresses. Although this sort of repetition is almost always a bad omen, Fauchet still held out hope. In a coded letter sent back to Paris, he noted that American adherence to the metric system might well prove advantageous to France. "Would it not make the People here more French if they shared in our knowledge; would it not bind them closer to us with commercial ties if they were subjected to our System of weights and measures?" He did worry; however, that Congress, having learned that the measures were merely "provisional," would deliberate and delay "as they so like to do."

While Congress dithered and America began a diplomatic rapprochement with Britain, Fauchet recklessly supported the Whiskey Rebellion, as a prelude to a great Jacobin revolution in the United States. This infuriated President Washington and prompted Fauchets recall to Paris. Six months later the House of Representatives voted to adopt national standards based on a modified version of the English foot and pound. These were not the ordinary foot and pound, but standards fixed by scientific experiment, and divisible into subunits of ten. The Speaker of the House urged passage. So long as each former colony had its own standards of weights and measures, national commerce would remain uncertain. This time, it was the Senate that killed the legislation by inaction.

Ken Alder
The Measure of All Things

A mathematician, an engineer, and a physicist...

A mathematician, an engineer, and a physicist are out hunting together. They spy a deer(*) in the woods.

The physicist calculates the velocity of the deer and the effect of gravity on the bullet, aims his rifle and fires. Alas, he misses; the bullet passes three feet behind the deer. The deer bolts some yards, but comes to a halt, still within sight of the trio.

"Shame you missed," comments the engineer, "but of course with an ordinary gun, one would expect that." He then levels his special deer-hunting gun, which he rigged together from an ordinary rifle, a sextant, a compass, a barometer, and a bunch of flashing lights which don't do anything but impress onlookers, and fires. Alas, his bullet passes three feet in front of the deer, who by this time wises up and vanishes for good.

"Well," says the physicist, "your contraption didn't get it either."

"What do you mean?" pipes up the mathematician. "Between the two of you, that was a perfect shot!"

(*) How they knew it was a deer:

The physicist observed that it behaved in a deer-like manner, so it must be a deer.

The mathematician asked the physicist what it was, thereby reducing it to a previously solved problem.

The engineer was in the woods to hunt deer, therefore it was a deer.

This is a bit grainy, but shows a quick view of some property corner recon from last Thursday in the east mountains. This was quite dense forest with a ton of scrub oak under the juniper and pinon coverage. There was quite a bit of elevation gain to get to point 1 as well which was a recon of the NGS point TAB. It took about an hour to get there through the dense underbrush and to no avail - point TAB appears to have been destroyed. Nice day looking for property corners though.

Metric System??

The following metric cartoon was published on 1999 October 04 in the Buffalo (NY) News following the crash of NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter into the planet Mars. The cartoon was reprinted in the 1999 Nov/Dec issue of Metric Today with permission of the newspaper.

Some points to ponder, as I'm reading the history of the metric system (albeit a bit long and not really action packed), it is somewhat interesting in it's origin. As surveyors, we use all types of units of measure, chains, varas, feet (US Survey foot and international foot) and of course metric as well. No mater how legislated the mater is, we have our history so firmly planted in the imperial system through the public lands survey system, that I would guess that commerce as a whole, in the USA, will never fully adopt metric. Attempts to do so have had mixed results - read about a costly Metric Mishap

Metric can be much more straight forward though. See below....

"BHI’s Chris Freeman Awarded for Survey Career Video
By Kris Toth on 3/13/2008
BHI surveyor and project manager Chris Freeman has received a Presidential Award from the Texas Society of Professional Surveyors (TSPS) for his work to produce a surveying career video for middle school students. As 2006-2007 TSPS Dallas Chapter President and a member of the TSPS Public Relations Committee, Chris was able to enlist a local high school media program, organize promotional efforts, and raise donations from area surveying firms to finance the video’s production. Bohannan Huston, Inc., was among the firms that made a donation to offset the production costs of the film. Students at Lakeview Centennial High School in Garland, Texas, produced the video, which you can view via the link shown below. The video is used statewide for career day activities and school presentations, and has received “thumbs up” reviews from students. Congratulations, Chris, and thank you for your contributions to the Texas survey community. "

There are 2 videos at the Surveytexas.org site, the second one on the page is the one mentioned above. One is about 10 minutes and one is about 5 minutes geared towards a high school or mid school audience.

What's the backsight?

This screen shot reminds me of a story told me by Jim Wheeler. Back in the day using total stations of setting out a proposed centerline for a road. There wasn’t much around so Jim set a temporary back-sight on a boulder near the horizon. Every two or three shots, he’d re-zero on the temp BS and after several rounds of this, noticed that his gun (total station) wasn’t holding it’s angle very well. Four or five more shots later, they began to notice that the staked centerline, which was supposed to be in a tangent (straight as an arrow) was curving off to the left. They kept going for a while until about 25-30 shots in, Jim noticed that the boulder he was back-sighting near the horizon was actually a cow grazing along. The centerline of the road was following the back-sight position of the cow. Oops…

Find That Monument

We don't have to deal much with the vegetation problem here in New Mexico. Looks fun...

BHI on the Front Cover of POB

BHI made the front cover of POB (Point of Beginning) on the March 2008 issue. POB is a national professional publication for those in the geomatics (surveying) profession. The article, Tunnel Vision, is written by Tim Jackson out of our Dallas, TX office and reviews our award winning scanning project of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit tunnels. Interestingly, the other lead article pertains to a NASCAR Superspeedway scanning project. BHI has also been involved with a NASCAR project from several years ago at Talladega. Cool technology with some high tech applications. Way to go Tim!

Back from ACSM

I'm back from the ACSM conference in Spokane, WA. Attended workshops on Wednesday and Thursday and thought they were worthwhile. The conference seemed a bit smaller than times past - probably because so many states have their state conference in March and Spokane is a bit out of the way on a national conference scale. One of the presenters in a workshop asked for a show of hands and about 75% were from the Washington area. It was a worthwhile time, however, and I got 2 years of Texas CEU's taken care of.

I attended a session on the Washington State Reference Network. Pretty impressive effort. I haven't had a chance to look at the web site, but this is the wave of the future - really, the wave of the present. New Mexico is about 7 to 10 years behind this, but at some point we will get caught up. There seems to be some valuable downloads at this site concerning RTNs - some light weekend reading I'm sure...

Historic Maps

If you like old, historic maps, there are some cool ones here. I'm off to the ACSM conference. Will be back on line in a couple of days...

RFID's

What do you think about RFIDs (Radio Frequency Identification) Tags? Here's a recent article about RFIDs in the garment industry. They're in use all over and there certainly is an aspect of privacy and lack thereof by the use of these - especially without the person's knowledge to gather information on them. Just think, you could have an RFID tag placed in your clothing and every time you enter a certain store, you could be tracked. A wealth of information - say an owner of a Gap store wants to know how many shoppers are "return customers" all they would have to do is turn the system on. It would tell you what they are wearing when they enter the store - you could probably even deduce the age of the garment and number of wash cycles it has been through.


My idea has been to implant an RFID tag inside every property corner cap that surveyors place to monument a property corner. Over time, all you would need is a special RFID reader on your survey equipment and it could interface the monument to a state registry of surveyor corners. You could instantly know the plat/document the point is associated with, who set it, when it was set, the coordinate value information. You could help determine if the point is authentic or was reset by another surveyor. The technology is already here - it will just take some forward thinking by the industry and state boards to enact a statewide system and registry. I could guess there would be a lot of push back by some in surveying, but it seems to me that a comprehensive monumentation RFID database will be the wave of the future.

Charter Statement Update

We had, what I thought, was a very productive meeting last week in developing our Regional Survey charter statement. Good participation from all in the group and I think we're well on our way to putting together a charter statement and vision statement that will help us move forward in our team approach. Over the next week, I will be putting together a draft of the actual language as brainstormed in the meeting and then let the group review, dissect and rewrite where necessary. I think we will go to the point of finalizing it and requesting signatures from all involved - really drawing the line in the sand as to whether or not everyone intends to play by the team rules so to speak.

Garmin Colorado

I got a new toy (after saving up some birthday and Christmas Gifts and some wellness certificates) and bought myself a Garmin Colorado 300. I've played with the Garmin Rino's before and am mostly familiar with the survey grade Trimble equipment. This will be for fun and I'm looking forward to trying it out. More to follow....

Happy Leap Year!!

Happy Leap Year ! It's amazing how precise our calendar actually is, but what's even more amazing in my opinion is the ability to calculate leap seconds. Unfortunate for NAVSTAR that GPS doesn't have a leap second function, but it's interesting to see the world slow down its rotational velocity over time as GPS time and UTC diverge....

Degree of Precision

"It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible."
Aristotle BC 384-322, Greek Philosopher

This has come up recently in conversation with respect to precision and accuracy of survey work. With the advent of GPS surveying, accuracy and precision can be achieved to a level that is so far beyond the abilities of past survey era equipment. Something comparable to the Wright Flyer and the Stealth Fighter. But we can so overdo things now as well. Spending hour upon hour to eek out an extra hundredth or thousandth of a foot, in my opinion, really is a waste of time depending on the application (much of land surveying applications fall within this category). Sometimes approximation, especially educated and rigorously derived approximation, is just fine. Save those extra hours and spend them with your family...

Charter Statement

Although the survey operations at BHI has been operating as a regional presence over the past year and a half, I have had the realization recently that we are lacking some key items to our team. Those being a charter statement and a mission statement. When we embarked on a regional approach in 2006, we immediately jumped into an operational and administrative approach without really defining our charter. I believe this is part of our continued struggle to obtain momentum across the southwest region of the US. We're going to start today on our video conference meeting to write our charter and mission statement. It will be interesting to see how each office participates (or not) and who is truly interested in creating a unified team with similar focus and purpose. I hope there will be value in backing up to the beginning to try and work through some of these issues.

Fence Hopping

Regardless of your views on illegal aliens/illegal border crossing, I would think that everyone could agree that there are negative impacts involved with the ease of crossing the border. We've had survey crews working along the Columbus, NM port of entry area directly across the border from Puerto Palomas, Mexico. There are issues with the drug trade here and I'm sure with any border crossing locations, the drug lord activity south of the border here is flowing over into the US side of the border. (See my post from several days ago about Kevlar vests).



This photo shows the U.S.A. / Mexico border, a nicely kept barbed wire fence. My guess is that someone frequently crossing the border, most likely involved with drug traffic, was spotted by Border Patrol and was quickly leaving jurisdiction by crossing back over into Mexico. Problem was that there was a mud puddle at this particular location and he lost his shoe in mid stride over the border. Dilemma: to cross back into America to get his shoe and risk being tied up in the bureaucracy of being deported or leave the shoe. Apparently the shoe lost out...

Grand Canyon Flood

We recently did some photogrammetric mapping for the Grand Canyon. It would be an interesting before and after look to compare the orthophoto images of the third proposed Grand Canyon Flood. It would be even more interesting to raft down the Grand Canyon at 41,000 cfs. Maybe someday....

Beauty in Engineering and Surveying??

"There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection."
H.G. Wells

What do you think? I tend to agree, however, we are in an industry today where nobody wants to pay for aesthetics - or at the very least a pittance is paid or it is an afterthought. If ugliness is the measure of imperfection in engineering, then is beauty the measure of perfection? If it is, how should we as engineers and surveyors move along the spectrum towards perfection of beauty. While exceptions might exist, beauty isn't something that we as humans can command and it happens - it takes time and thought and focus.

The same can be said for surveying and mapping I believe. An "ugly" product shows lack of focus and thought, and a lack of ingenuity. A map or plat is something that can show beauty if given or provided the time to create. Something we strive to do here at BHI although there is always the tension of time and budget and the pull to show data as it has always been shown rather than try something new. I think we do an exceptional job at pushing the envelope to create and develop new ideas and develop a product that shows beauty.

I think it can be done…

Caught in the act

For those not familiar, from the standpoint of environment, survey crews often have a difficult job. They can work long hours (whenever the sun is up – and sometimes when it’s not) and they work in any environmental conditions – both weather and locale. Maybe not to the US Postal Carriers level (Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds), but they certainly battle snow, rain and heat plus some other weather phenomenon. They also have to go where the projects are, whether it’s in the urban war zone, or in the middle of nowhere miles from the nearest road. The project may be near hazardous materials or hazardous land owners – which is worse? Who knows. They work tough hours in sometimes harsh conditions. That being said, it’s always nice to catch one of our crews in the act of working hard. Case in point, here’s an aerial photo (taken from several thousand feet) of one of our crew members controlling an aerial control panel (ATV is in the upper right). This project cut it close, the last panel being set as the flight began but he met his goal and got the job done…

Which way is North

When creating a map of the north pole or south pole, which direction should the north arrow point on the map?? Not a problem away from the poles, but north pointing up on a map is convention only. Many of the oldest maps were oriented such that east was pointed up. And for that matter, why is 0° Longitude based on Greenwich meridian? Many of the older USA maps show 0° Longitude through New York City. Simply put - it is convention. An agreed upon standard that all can base their starting point from. While standards are important, I'd also challenge you to think beyond standard convention. North isn't always up...

Bohannan Huston, Inc. - Where I work

Thought I'd let you see where I work ... Bohannan Huston, Inc. I've worked here since 1994 - it's been a great company to work for and we have many great projects to work on. More to follow on BHI down the road. Just a quick intro.

Kevlar Vests

According to Mark Marrujo, our Survey Operations Manager in the Las Cruces Office:

"US Customs at the Columbus Port of Entry felt it necessary due to the kind of activity over the past few weeks in this area [on the US / Mexico border] that our field crew opt for wearing Kevlar Vests instead of Surveying Vests. Since our field crew was being escorted by Customs police with M-16s they made sure not to say “shoot it” to one another while collecting field data conventionally."

Shown is Johnny, one of our Surevy Crew Chiefs ready for action...

First Blog Post Ever

This is my first blog post ever. Pretty basic stuff here - I'm hoping that this will serve as a forum for ideas on the surveying industry and our business specifically as we embark on expanded regional survey services for Bohannan Huston Inc. More to come later - I'll leave with a parting shot east of Grants, NM.