If we didn't have ten fingers would we care so much about decimals? They aren't particularly well suited to anything more than any other number system. Base 12 actually has a lot more going for it.
http://www.chriswarbo.net/projects/units/metric_red_herring....
PS: The SI unit of time is the "second"; which is actually a sexagesimal fraction (a "pars minuta secunda", AKA a second small part; which is a sixtieth of a "pars minuta", a sixtieth of an hour)
I would also be very careful and not conflate metric and SI systems. There are all sorts whacky metric systems (although most of them historical) that are not nearly as clean as SI. And even SI historically has been messier than its today.
(are the values reasonable? well, human-scale capacitors and resistors seem pretty heavily skewed away from the center of the scale…)
SI cannot "convert from seconds to meters", since it treats length and duration as separate dimensions. Any multiplier which turns a duration into a length must have dimension of length/duration (and hence SI units of meters/seconds); something with those units is a speed, not a conversion factor (which is dimensionless). That's not specific to any particular speed, whether c or otherwise.
The first one is to split a batch of something: there's more ways to split 12 of something than 10 of something, but you can use base 10 and still do things in batches of 12.
The second reason is for easy divisibility checks, but for that all that matters is prime divisors. Base 12 and base 10 have the same number of prime divisors 2 and 3 versus 2 and 5. But base 10 has an interesting property here, because 10-1 is 9, which is a power of 3 you get somewhat easy divisibility rules for both 9 and 3. 12-1, on the other hand, is 11 which is prime so you only have a relatively uninteresting divisibility rule for 11.
I think at best you can claim that 12 is about as good as 10. Base 60 would be strictly better than base 10 if it weren't for the fact that we can't easily memorize multiplication tables for base 60.
I don't think anybody memorizes multiplication tables anymore. At least I wasn't taught that when I was in school (I'm 29)
I guess OP meant that for a base-60 system we would have to do a lot of caching.
I think you minimize how useful that is.
If I am at the grocery store and want to figure out how much something is relative to something else, I have to divide quantity by price for two different things, which is annoying to do when you only have 1/2 and 1/5 be round numbers.
When splitting a check between people the same thing applies.
Just because we have credit cards and calculators doesn't mean these abilities aren't useful, or wouldn't have been useful for the vast majority of human existence. I mean, British money was on a 12 / 20 basis up until the 1970s, and Romans used 12 which is still present in US measures. So obviously people found it useful. It is by chance and history that we ended up basing SI units on decimals -- it could have easily been 12 if say a few French scientists who would have convinced the rest hadn't had their heads chopped during the revolution or whatever.
Would it be easier for you if you are using base 2 or base 16?
It is not easy to eyeball divisions of 5 by hand; you pretty much need to use a ruler for that to get results of tolerable accuracy.