* Scientists and engineers culturally select tasteful units of their choice to represent time, like 1300 milliseconds or 134 hours... and everything else as well: $1.34 billion or $1.34 dollars, not $1 billion and 340 million or $1 dollar and 34 cents.
* When the number representation get too big, people just do X * 10^n where n is a tasteful choice.
* In business, days and hours are distinct concepts and should not be mixed together or confused. A person who worked for 5 days did not work 120 hours.
* Mathematicians could care less.
* Many culturally common units of time are bigger than 12 * 12.
* Calculations that are big are working-memory bound. This is the biggest point. Working memory is probably the strongest factor to large and fast calculation of any kind.
* The bigger the calculation, the more people tend to 10^n multiplicands with the distributive property, rather than 12^n, since most people work in base 10. Some engineers use 2^n or 3^n (I offer that 3^n is efficient without further explanation).
I propose the hypothesis that children who memorized up to 10 * 10 are no more likely to join or do well in the STEM fields than those who memorized up to 12 * 12.