[gridlock]

Ask a three-year-old to mark the middle of a line, and they will get it right to within 5% or so. Ask a thirty-year-old to mark 0.3 of a line, and he will be off by 10% or more.

The human mind naturally divides things into halves, quarters, eighths, etc. It also divides things into thirds fairly well. Thus the Base 12 system, not surprisingly, makes a lot of sense. I say “not surprisingly” because organically-derived systems often make a lot of sense.

Our numbering system is Base 10 because we happen, by evolutionary accident, to have five fingers on each hand. But 10 is a very unweildy number, factoring into 2 and the prime 5. Splitting it up quickly yields either indecipherable strings of digits, or meaningless decimal fractions. It just doesn’t match the way the human mind works.

[AnAmericanMother]

The English system works. And you're right that it grew up organically -- King Henry's shipwrights were using it, and probably the boys in Domesday Book as well. Anybody who's ever thrown together a backyard shed or a kid's playhouse benefits from the experience of a thousand years of English craftsmen.

The boffins and bureaucrats in the EU have probably never soiled their soft, white hands with a hammer and a bag of nails.