
Originally Posted by
oddler
What's the reason? I'm just asking because I don't know what the reasoning behind it is.
Our time system is nice and easy to use because it's easily divisible into a bunch of common numbers: 2, 3, 4, etc. The base 10 in metric doesn't matter so much in daily live, but stuff like 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 does. Half-hour, quarter-hour, etc, are expressions heard all the time, and those times are easily calculated. The same goes for the imperial foot: 12 inches, 36 inches to a yard. You can easily divide that into half, thirds, or fourths. Whereas in a base-10 system, the numbers 10, 50, 100 are not divisible by 3, which is a fraction used much more commonly in daily life than 1/10.