> But it's this same laziness, IMHO, that makes the majority of people
assume
> base 10 is always best, hence metric. We're drilled into working mentally
in
> base 10, but other bases are often "better" - base 2 and base 16 being
> obvious examples for this community.


Different issues. It's not the base that matters but the fact that ALL
measurements are expressed in terms of the same base. You could have a
measurement system using, say, base 60 ("better" because it has more factors
:-) (2,3,4,5,6,10,12,20,30))  as the Babylonians did and, as long as all
sub-units scaled down in base 60 as well, the system would be fine. It's
when you start changing the base at different arbitrary points along the way
so that you cannot perform consistent computations with the units, that you
have problems.

Inconsistent:
    (Farthing, halfpenny), penny, shilling, pound, guinea.
    Ounce, pound, hundredweight, ton.

Consistent:
    (Angstrom), nanometre, micrometre, millimetre, (centimetre),
(decimetre), metre, kilometre, ...
    Srob, bleck, glurb, tchum        (I made these up)

    All base 10:
    1 bleck = 60 Srob,
    1 glurb = 3600 Srob = 60 bleck
    1 tchum = 216,000...

    Units in brackets do not really belong in each series per se.

Now if a hundredweight had been 125 pounds it may have made some sense :-)
Or somewhere about 128 pounds so that it was the force from something that
massed 4 slugs.
But 112 pounds is useful mainly to terrorise students.

A guinea is an affectation :-)



        Russell McMahon

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