Debating the best way to draft a Model T

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> So here we are as surveyors debating how to draft plans on paper for a Model T, riding a jetliner, and soon to be on a spaceship. Anybody even thought about purchasing a ticket for what's coming in the very near future. Probably going to be more than which symbol denotes what, legend, line width or size and amount of text to put on paper or Mylar.

The principles of graphic communication by way of cartographic aesthetics are just that, principles. They are resiliantly stable and for the most part, they carry through from one medium to the next with little change.

Stephen

True. The software developers will decide, probably already have.

> What are we besides a bunch of dinosaurs about to become extinct trying to design our Model T graveyard?

Aren't you the guy who was wondering why the title company rewrote your metes and bounds description? Now you want to send them a kml and just tell them to "stick it into Google Earth"? It sounds like a cadastral version of MERS. You should be able to sell tickets to that. :>

Once we get off the Model T and into the future, get past the past, there won't be any need for title companies. The parasite of the dinosaur will die with it.

> Once we get off the Model T and into the future, get past the past, there won't be any need for title companies. The parasite of the dinosaur will die with it.

Well, why do you think that in this glorious future you have in mind where you won't have to worry about how to present survey information anyone will want to pay you anything for a kml file that the local GIS manager can give them for free? It'll go down this way: "Mr. Day, we've warned you about this before. The shape file that you submitted doesn't come anywhere close to fitting the official GIS. I'm afraid that we are going to have to revoke your privileges to submit data to us since you have such problems with your surveys."

Eagerly awaiting that day, are you? Wouldn't it be easier just to work on drafting more communicative maps in 2014? I'm just asking.

The Dinosaur is our whole land records system. It's antiquated, stuck in a past of poor records on paper stashed away in the county court house. They finally decided it was to hard to prove your title to day one in this paper mess so they came up with title insurance. That need turned into a Parasite as they've insured most properties several times without having to pay claims, for the most part they don't need to research anything. They just pull the file from the plant and collect a fat premium.

The Model T is the land surveying industry tied into the Dinosaur. You're the perfect example Kent. To do any survey the whole record from day one needs to be researched, sorted by which line was first, corrected for error by continually tuning up each line as we get better at laying out the record. The Model T doesn't even recognize our boundary law (really slow in its own advancement) that recognizes the chaos and damage done to the landscape by this system (advanced measuring systems operated by the Model T).

Now there are solutions to this mess but the Model T and especially the Parasite have powerful ties to the government and don't want their party to end. There is money to made off this mess, income that would evaporate if the mess were put in the landfill of history. So it's going to persist until the food supply is used up and the Host can't afford it any longer (recognizes that they are broke and efficiencies are forced upon the land).

So really its basically as simple as this:

The Model T is retired by the GIS being seeded with the legal corner coordinates. The Model T is updated to corvette for a few years and then retired for the most part to get this done. Some help from the courts is required. The corner positions will need to be declared final to put all the research into the past and tinkering with boundaries to sleep.

The Parasite will go the way of the Dodo bird as the Dinosaur dies. It may require some adjudication of who owns what at some cut off date so the Dinosaur of the past doesn't need to be insured any longer. Also, at some point the Host will get the vaccine and realize what the Parasite is doing, that it doesn't need and can't afford to feed the Parasite any longer. The Parasite will be the hardest to kill.

Technology will prevail in the end. It will break loose form the chains of the lobbing interests. The Model T won't last, the Dinosaur will die taking out the Parasite. The Host, to survive, needs the vaccine and to afford to live will have to adopt efficiencies. Complexity will be replaced by simplicity. It happens in every cycle of the generations. I'd give it about ten years max to happen.

Some of us are visionary and ,well, some of us are not.

:good: :good: :good:

Nowadays (after 1871 for some and after 1933 for everyone else) title insurance mostly replaces the need for a survey, unless the insurers themselves want to make sure of what they are insuring.

Researching the changes in citizenship and forms of law that occurred over that time are left as an exercise for the curious. Or you can wait for my book 🙂

With regard to diagnosis of the Dinosaur, here is an interesting mental exercise (you guys who already know it all don't hurt yourself trying this):

Imagine a bell curve. All the normal people are in the middle, and some are at the peak.

Off each end are the outliers. One tail is the dregs of society, the urban never-do-wells, the unwashed, the unhirable and untrainable. The other tail is the creative, the highly educated, scientists, researchers, Nobel Prize winners etc.

The dinosaurs are dead in the middle. However, their worldview is that the bell curve is folded in half, so that they can look down on all the outliers, good or bad, and proclaim superiority. There is not much of a cure, except being more open minded in the first place.

When people here fail to be open to new ideas, they prove they are sitting on the top of that bell curve, looking down. They do not see the creative outliers over their shoulder, changing the world.

wait, who are we again in this dystopian drama??

"the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated"....

I don't know about deliverables, but I do think collection and database storage will be more GIS like. Just as you alluded to: images, scans, video, audio, raw data, coordinates, reports, all linked to geometry (points and lines).

Mr. Day,

Very well stated and worthy of serious discussion. I think that some of the dinosaurs here forget that a Record-Of-Survey is just an opinion. That opinion may carry a lot of weight, but it is still just an opinion.

Dave

Half Bubble,

Nice metaphor. Looks like your bubble is well centered.

Dave

> To do any survey the whole record from day one needs to be researched, sorted by which line was first, corrected for error by continually tuning up each line as we get better at laying out the record.

It sounds as if you're complaining about having to actually retrace boundaries when you can see the fences in Google Earth. The system you describe can be implemented in Utah next month if your legislature would just pass the Google Earth Titles Act. Then you'll be able to retire and find something else to do. How great will that be? :>

> What are we besides a bunch of dinosaurs about to become extinct trying to design our Model T graveyard?

A quick check from my friend Google reveals:

The average mechanic and automotive technician earned $36,180 in 2011. The highest earners made about $59,600, while the lowest-paid took home $20,620 during the same period.

An American Farriers Journal survey in 2012 found that the average annual salary for full-time farriers in the U.S. was reported to be $92,623

There is something to be said for holding onto arcane knowledge. 😉

Kent,

I have a hard time picking the gems of thought from your posts, so I thought I'd give you some unsolicited, "helpful" advice.

Civility and manners are never out of style. When a back is up, ideas can't get through. You're pompous and pedantic, and yes, a bully. Quietly asking and answering in turn works better on a forum.

Dave

The underlying problem is CAD.

CAD deals with a flat Earth. GIS deals with geodetics and mapping projections.

We really ought not use CAD for anything bigger than a quarter section or so.

The newer CADs claim to take care of the issues (working in state plane, scale factors, etc.) but the code is all proprietary so there is no way to review what it is doing other than as a black box. And what small percentage of surveyors actually have the latest & greatest CAD ?

The way for surveyors to regain people's trust is to quit quibbling about absolute measurements and accept that we ought to agree if our points fall in each others error ellipses. Failure to understand this, whether via Jobo's hat or network least squares analysis, is why pincushions happen. And that is why everyone dreads seeing a surveyor or heaven help us his unsupervised crew show up in the neighborhood.

How to get back there is to mandate reporting your boundary control in terms of 95% confidence relative positional precision right on the face of the Record of Survey. Require it any time someone uses GPS, and encourage its use at all other times. Require a "narrative of redundancy" explaining why you think you have enough redundancy to make the statistics meaningful.

Leave a "grandfather clause" wherein those who do not use GPS (edit # 3: or least squares) are required to report a "narrative of closures" -- their unadjusted angle balance and the traverse closures for given survey -- on the face of the ROS.

This would eliminate the guys who are mixing grid and ground from their RTK and their total station. Either learn least squares or give up the GPS.

Our DNR Survey Advisory Board has been asked by the BOR to propose language like this for updating the accuracy standards. Nobody else from the public showed up to the meeting so I guess I get to write it. They took notes. Lots of notes.

edit # 2 (typos then continuity)
We need to take over GIS, maybe one of the Open Source packages like QGIS where we can actually examine the math and the projections. And we need a least squares that works in 3D geodetic to check the data that goes in. The only way to make the GIS thing work is to take it over from within. The only way to do that is to stand on our knowledge of accuracy and precision via least squares.

> Civility and manners are never out of style. When a back is up, ideas can't get through.

Hey, it isn't my fault that Leon is bugged that some land title insurance company didn't bother to use the metes and bounds description that he prepared accompanied by a map that I would think anyone teaching survey drafting would want the students to see for the obvious reasons.

So, if the Utah solution is to get rid of land title insurance companies and "dinosaur" surveyors who want to find land boundaries, what's left that would be quick and easy to implement? Why, Google Earth with members of the US Power Squadron serving in their customary capacities, supplemented by the geocaching community. It's merely the logical and practical implementation of Leon's scheme and could be up and running next year if only the Utah legislature would act to make it legal.

> I don't know about deliverables, but I do think collection and database storage will be more GIS like. Just as you alluded to: images, scans, video, audio, raw data, coordinates, reports, all linked to geometry (points and lines).

Well, the essential problem isn't going to disappear until the entire nature of property is revisited by various legislatures and possibly an amendment to the US Constitution. That is, people own what they own and the entire point of a survey is to identify the evidence that supports an opinion as to the spatial limits of that ownership. That is the essential ingredient of a survey that will be produced in court.

So, which would you as a landowner rather take to court: a clear, well prepared map showing the connection of your record title to the boundaries presented on the map or a hodge-podge of raw data and digital data that will mean nothing to the court and only provide more avenues to attack the basis of the "survey" upon which you rely?

Oh, courts are no longer to be the venue for trying land titles and land boundaries? Why didn't you say so? Do the lawyers who populate the state legislatures know this?

It sounds like a nightmare to me. I have been around computers enough to know that what your using today might possibly not be able to be opened 20 years from now. The more elaborate, the greater the chance will be that it is no longer supported.

> It sounds like a nightmare to me. I have been around computers enough to know that what your using today might possibly not be able to be opened 20 years from now. The more elaborate, the greater the chance will be that it is no longer supported.

You bring up a valid point; I mean, have you been to your local archive and needed to look at an old deed on microfilm? How'd that work out for you?

Are you saying we shouldn't try to improve on that? Just because that system is failing, we should perpetuate it? Isn't that like whipping a dead horse; or maybe trying to fit it with a new pair of shoes?

I heard those guys make pretty good money....B-)