I'd say that the reason we use base 10 is, without question, because we have 10 fingers. Vigesimal systems (base 20) were also once common all over the world (the Mayan and Aztecs are most well known) but that was because they used all their fingers and all their toes too.
This isn't about the characters, it's about your audience. If you write for a base-12 using audience, then you're in the right to think base 12 is the way to go. In the meantime, can you tell me what 12 to the 7th power is? How about 10 to the 7th? There is some math that's easier to do base π, and there's plenty of good reason to consider using base e. It would have to be a major story point to be worth confusing your readers over.
We weren't (not originally anyway) talking about Higher Maths. The thread is about units of measurement, so your "audience" is predominantly ordinary people doing simple everyday maths (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) as traders, salesmen, artisans and customers, and not engineers, physicists or computer scientists (well it could be if it's a SF story.) My point is that a dozen is a much easier unit to work with (most especially for division) than a pack of ten. How often does one ever need to say what 12 to the 7th power is when working on a market stall? (Or in a SF story for that matter?)
In base 12. Yes. It's 10000000.
Why yes, it's (M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M)(M) (D)(C)(C)(C)(X)(X)(X)MDCCCVIII.
As @farntfar said, if we decided to use base 12 then 12 to the power of 7 would be 10,000,000. Simple. I think using base 12 would have been a marginally better choice (thousands of years ago) than base 10. Its not a huge deal though. 10 has the advantage of matching the number of fingers a human owns (making counting easier). Using a non integer base (like e or pi) would be dreadful for day to day use.
Indeed. There are 10 kinds of people: those that understand binary, and those that don't.
You're correct. I shouldn't have added that "for any kind of purpose" because there are probably plenty of purposes where other bases are already in common usage.
Although we don't know why the Sumerians/Babylonians were so keen on a base 60/base 10 number system, my guess (echoed by Greek writers around the 6th century BCE) is that they quickly found that 60 and numbers built on it, especially 360, are superior composite numbers, so making it nice and easy to divide them with lots of smaller numbers.
And yet the spacing of the Knots was common among all sailors and nobody thought to correlate that spacing to units of measure used on land.I find the origins of things quite fascinating. For example, the knot used for measuring a ship's speed came about because, in the seventeenth century, a piece of wood known as a Common Log was thrown over the stern with a length of rope attached. The log was kind of triangular (I'd guess to produce drag and pull on the coil of rope on the ship). The rope had a series of equally spaced knots tied in it and, after a specific amount of time, the number of knots dragged out by the log indicated the speed of the vessel. The values of the Common Log were entered into the ship's logbook.
Such a simple method and naming convention
P.S. I'd surmise that the Common Log was so called because it's shape, weight and size would be common to every ship.
