I was looking at things in my bookshelf and found one of my beginning astronomy textbooks from the University of California at Berkeley: "Intelligent Life in the Universe", by I.S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan, 1966. In it I found this most interesting paragraph, on page xii, written by Sagan.
"Our arithmetic is based upon the base 10, probably because we have ten fingers on our hands, and mathematics developed among people who counted on their fingers. The metric system of units, introduced in France at the time of the French revolution, is also constructed on the base 10. For example, there are 10 millimeters in a centimeter; 1000 grams to a kilogram; and so forth. The United States, United Kingdom, and a few other countries are still stuck in the morass of what is called the English system of units, in which, for example, 12 inches make a food; 16 ounces make a pound; and 5280 feet make a mile -- as if the English system had developed among some species of animal with a strange and variable number of appendages. In this book we use primarily the metric system. Distances will be measured in centimeters, meters, kilometers, and so forth; masses will be measured in grams and their multiples; and time will be measured in seconds.&n!
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bsp; A conversion from metric to English units will be made where the metric units are first introduced in the body of the text. The reader is encouraged to adopt the metric system of units in his thinking about the contents of this book."
Carleton
