It's a classic flamewar topic, you put down a particular country, and you just did it again. That's flamebait enough and nationalistic enough for the internet.

Please don't post like this to HN again.

Most adults in the UK still measure their weight in stones and pounds, at least in my personal experience, and I have never come across anyone (except those raised in other countries) using either plain pounds or metric units for this purpose.

Babies weigh less than 1 stone (14 lb), they would traditionally be weighed in pounds and ounces.

From searching "baby weight NHS", it looks like all the advice uses grams, so I assume that's current practise.

> Looks like they had 3 fingers per hand, so base 6 seems a likely choice.

Depends how they use their fingers and whether they use other body parts. There is evidence for human cultures having ranged from 4 to 10, 12, 16, and 20 (technically there are higher ones but they usually have sub-bases in that range).

You can count to 12 on a single hand (24 on two hands) by pointing phalanges with the thumb for instance. Some native cultures had base 8 using the space between the fingers rather than the fingers themselves.

Opinion: Highly composite numbers make good bases.

2, 6, 12, 60, etc

Number of fingers doesn't matter, although you can shoehorn almost any base into them. For example, base 6 lets you count to 5 on one hand and use your other to coujt multiples of 6. This lets you count to 35 on two hands.

More info here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_highly_composite_nu...

But what you call base 6 they might call base 10

every base is is base 10...from a certain perspective

The ancient Sumerian number system was base 6. Our units of time are still based on that.

60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours.

They may have 10 of something else...

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