At 06:30 03/01/03 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
The foot, for example, is evenly divisible into inches by 2, 3, and 4. That sort of division comes up all the time in carpentry.
Cup, pint, quart, half-gallon, gallon -- binary! More rational than decimal, if you're likely to be multiplying and dividing by 2. (As in, doubling or halving a recipe.)
...but strangely, when I try to explain to Americans how money worked in Britain before 1971, they think I'm crazy. ;-)
Rob