I'm surprised there's no mention of the relationship between time and the origin of the metric system in this article. Interestingly enough, it takes a 1-meter pendulum 1 second to swing from side to side, no matter how high you raise it. Mechanical clocks relied on pendulum motion to keep time, and so the meter was created (at least partly) to standardize the size of the pendulum needed to create an accurate clock! Now that's an interesting story.
10 vs 12 - A coworker nicely put it to me when I asked him why US is still using 12, as 12 inches is one foot, and he told me that during the great US expansion it was much easier to deal in units of 12 - you can divide 12 by 2, 3, 4 and 6, while 10 was divisible only by 2 and 5. Now whether that was really the case I don't know, but sounds like cool theory.
> Interestingly, in order to keep atomic time in agreement with astronomical time, leap seconds occasionally must be added to UTC. Thus, not all minutes contain 60 seconds. A few rare minutes, occurring at a rate of about eight per decade, actually contain 61.<p>So the second should be a tiny bit longer? Like 1.00000015 times longer?
60=2x3x2(4)x5 makes sharing farming products easier among 2,3,4,5,6,10,12 people.<p>77=7x11 is cool too, but families/partners with 7 or 11 people are less common
> Although it is unknown why 60 was chosen<p>Oh come on. This is not rocket science.<p>There is an easy way to count to 12 with just one hand: place your thumb on one of your phalanxes. There are three for each of the remaining fingers: hence, 4*3=12 possibilities. Babylonians counted this way, hence the duodecimal system.<p>You can use your second hand to count to five, as usual. 5x12 = 60. If you show one of the fingers on your left hand, and one of the phalanxes of your right hand, it really clearly communicates a number from 1 to 60.<p>This is why the base 60 was chosen.
This is why the metric system is stupid.<p>Now, last time I said this I was downvoted, but just because base 10 is convenient academically doesn't mean it is a great idea in day to day life.<p>The metric system is great for doing science but totally annoying for doing carpentry, for example. Centimeters are generally not a convenient size, and something as simple as dividing a piece of wood in to thirds is unnecessarily imprecise.