Originally Posted by Mxfrank

Feet and inches are more sensible. What isn't sensible is the decimal system. Duodecimal (base 12) is the natural counting system for humans. That's why 12 hours in a day, 12 in a dozen, 12 eggs in a box, 360 degree in a circle, 60 minutes in an hour. There's a reason why so many of our measurements are base 12.

First, where it comes from. Hold up your hand. Using your thumb, count the joints on your four fingers. 12. it's faster to count on your joints, and you can count higher. From there, accumulate 12's on your other hand. You can accumulate five 12's, or 60. Or you can accumulate 12 12's, or 144.

This system of counting goes back at least to the Babylonians. It was used by the Egyptians and Greeks. The Romans weren't 'rithmetricians, and had their own oddball system. But they used the Greek methods of counting for any serious engineering or accounting. Finger counting systems based on duodecimal arithmetic became very sophisticated, and there's a method of duodecimal finger computation that is similar to an abacus. For larger sums, a stone table with reliefs for each digit was used in conjunction with differnt color pebbles for counting and computation. Thus our word "counter", and the greek word "trapeza" (bank).

This world pretty much evaporated in the dark ages, during which Europe managed to unlearn two millenia of mathematics. During the late middle ages, arithmetic was gradually reintroduced from India by way of Arab traders. The indians used the decimal system, augmented by the invention of zero. Which sounds odd, but you can't count to zero on your fingers. So it's not an intuitive idea. Classical mathematics survived only in measurement systems, while the usurping decimal system conquered the western world.

So I'm all for metrication, but based on duodecimal. Bring back the classics. The only other alternative is to decimalize time and triangles, to be consistent