"Richard Caley" MY_FIRST_NAME @ MY_LAST_NAME.org.uk wrote in message
...
In article , Andrew McKay (am)
writes:

am Decimal is good in terms of being able to add and subtract in your
am head (for most people anyway).

Ah, but, that is not inherent in 10 or in people. It is just the base
you have been taught to use from when you were small.

The only excuses for picking 10 are tradition and that we have 10
digits on our hands. The latter only sounds important until you
try and think how often you count on your fingers.

Actually, base 6 is better for counting on your fingers (left hand
units, right hand sixes).

Of course the tradition argument is pretty bullet proof, it would be
painful to change all the numbers written anywhere to another base, to
say the least, we can only sulk and think how much better life would
have been if some indian inventing our modern positional notation had
stopped and thought for a moment and picked base 12.

Anyway, the point is that the bases used in traditional measures are
not (all) arbitrary. Most of them were chosen (actually emerged from
the darwinian selection of centuries of use) to suit the tasks the
units were used for. Just like binary or hex for computers actually.

Mind you, 14 pounds in a stone is completely weird, but that's why we
don't use stones for anything we need to do arithmetic on.

I used to do my arithmetic on a slate using chalk!

Alan
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