12 inches, dozen eggs, 24 hours, 360 degree circle is 30 sets of 12...
If it weren't for the human justification of having 10 fingers on our hands, the base 10 metric system may not have gained traction at all.
From what I understand, in places without a highly developed positional number system, fractions for units were generally developed in an ad-hoc way, for convenience, whereas in places with a more entrenched base ten tradition (especially in East Asia where the “abacus” was made of beads on a fixed frame instead of a collection of loose pebbles on a board) fractional units were more often tenths. The metric system takes that tendency to an extreme.
In general, the metric system is an example of building a system less well suited to particular use cases, but overall more cohesive and systematic. Since modern people are universally schooled in base ten positional arithmetic, the metric system becomes reasonably familiar and convenient.
You can do it with one hand, you can easily visualize dividing by two and four, you can count higher (144 if you use two hands), and it clearly looks way cooler.
Sounds pretty speculative. Has there been historical research about the age of these “traditional counting systems”?
I’m skeptical that this is the origin of the Sumerian number system.
I can count binary on my fingers and get much further than with decimal obviously, but it's not very practical or easy to learn. This makes fantastic sense and sounds almost as easy as decimal, the only difference being that it goes a few digits further.
The metric system uses base 10 all around. Not because we have 10 fingers, but because that's the system most widely used.
Edit: This made me think about the scale of things you're measuring. Roads are generally best measured in miles, not yards, feet, or inches. Some things are better measured in yards (like football fields or concrete (cubic yards)). Some things are best measured in feet, and some things in inches.
The avoirdupois system is human sized. The metric system is based on some inaccurate 18th century French calculation of the circumference of the earth, IIRC. Why would you care what your height is in relationship to the circumference of the earth? That never made sense to me.
Rarely does it matter if you can convert from one unit to the other. The only exception I can think of is when doubling or halving a recipe - going from teaspoons to tablespoons or liquid ounces can be a pain.
The problem is that although perhaps certain units may be good for measuring certain things, the things you use those measurements for will frequently involve things that use different units.
To take your road example again, what if I want to find out how many revolutions it takes a wheel with a 4 foot circumference to travel a mile? What if I want to find out how many yard long strides it takes to go down a road?
The metric units are interoperable. That's their big advantage.
Converting to miles is not practical.
It feels like a rollercoaster... https://morganalyx.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/metric-system...