We could certainly do it: clocks already work on base-12. And it would be a whole lot more convenient: 12 is divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6, while poor 10 gets only 2 and 5. I suppose it was what I had in mind a while back when I tried to lop a dozen years off my age. I just didn't know they had a society before, much less a renaming.
There is an American branch, but I gather the mother church here is British, and it all does seem very British, not so? Recall it was Plantagenet Palliser in the Trollope novels dedicated his political career to the establishment of the decimal currency. Had he lived to climb that mountain, one has to suppose he would have moved on.
Anyway, here's to you,
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Base twelve (and variants) is practically simpler - especially when you don't have a calculator handy. It's the reason why a pint is 16 oz and a foot 12 inches. Also the reason why surveying units are based on a 360 degree circle and degrees are subdivided into minutes and seconds of arc. And roads are about 36 feet across, enough for two lanes and 12 feet of shoulder (6 on each side).
Part of the problem, too, is that decimal units are often just straight conversions from the English. So a 12 oz beer ordered in Germany gets you 33 cls. 33 is a pretty stupid number but thats what you get when all the beer cans are manufactured to hold 12 oz.
The issue is a bit of a first in best off situation. Presumably whoever crafted the original units made everything proportionally sensible - hence a pint of beer is just about right and a liter simply too much. That's what happens when you try to base the competition (metric units) on an impractical and somewhat arbitrary logical standard: a liter being about one kg of frozen water.
My understanding is that the original metric users also wanted to craft a ten day week and have 100 minute hours, etc. Decimal logic pretty quickly breaks down.
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