How many inches in a foot?

I was messing with my phone and opened the unit converter. It said that there are 11.9996 inches in a foot.



Are the manufacturers idiots or is there something that i dont know?How many inches in a foot?
calculators use various "rounding" methods for expressions. They dont give exact numbers; because in reality, most numbers dont terminate so rounding is necessary. How accurate your calculator estimates depends on its programing and its capacity for programing.
Inches and feet are from a very weird measurement system. I don't really know much beyond the fact that our system is based of measurements of the human body.



For example, the Fahrenheit system is a temperature system based from 0 to 100. 0 is the temperature of salt mixed with ice and ammonium chloride, and 100 was supposed to be body temperature, but Fahrenheit was sick with a 100 degree fever the day he made that scale! I don't know how much evidence there is to support that, but that's what I remember reading somewhere. I think it was my chemistry book from last year.



Our resistance to the Celsius system is probably due to the larger size of each degree in the other scales. As a mechanical engineer, it's annoying to switch to a LESS accurate system where integral Fahrenheit degrees are adequate for a lot of technical work. Otherwise, well have to use fractions or divide by 1.8...



Since the US has a lot of termodynamical work, we tend to shy away from systems like that.



However, it's not to say that the Celsius scale is useless. It's just used for different things. It's like painting a photo with less than half the colors you normally have.



The inch is based off the human thumb. From the bend point to the tip, a hand is well... a hand, a cubit is from your elbow to the tip of your fingers, and I mile was established before the human body system that was used by the greeks. I'm sure it's much more organized than I'm making it sound, but I'm sure google has a lot of sources like this one. One thing that's untrue however is that a "foot" is based on feet. The word inch comes from the Latin word uncia which means "one twelfth". So long story short, your phone IS without a doubt wrong. I believe that your phone is based off the metric system and is basing it's calculation off the number 2.54 which is the number you use to convert to inches.



Here's a good page that tells you exacly what's a perfect number conversion and what's not.



http://www.sfei.org/ecoatlas/GIS/MapInte鈥?/a>



If you click on the * it'll tell you that it's an exact convertion.How many inches in a foot?
Your phone calculator is retarded.How many inches in a foot?
12
12 well those are the error estimates that number can go on forever. So we just say its 12.
Well,



11.9999999.... = 12