Well, the fractions are base 2, not base 12. I think the "foot" was the King's foot, right (don't recall which, probably not King John)? You could keep the bone after he's dead as the standard, provided it doesn't shrink when it's dried--they supposedly have all kinds of problems with the "standards" in Paris based on metals, and people keep trying to replace them with physical constants like the speed of light and the electronic charge and Planck's constant which can be measured more accurately. We are indeed stuck with 10 fingers. And it screws us up in binary, because 1/10 is an infinite series in base 2 and cannot be represented in a finite computer memory (and having two states is necessary to avoid having to measure voltages super precisely). I do recall some poor soul going out to 32 decimal places or so, discovering that the result wasn't exact, and claiming there was a "bug" in java. The advantage of base 10 is that the numbers don't seem so long as binary (10 decimal is 1010 binary, 12 octal, and A hexadecimal). Esparanto as an attempt to standardize language never caught on either (and it's biased against a lot of non-Western languages). This kind of stuff gives "scholars" something to do, I guess.
