OK, how do you even handle fractions in your system? And how do you convert between different scales? In metric I can describe my height as 1.74 m or 1m 74cm or 174 cm or 1740 mm, it’s trivial to convert between these units and to see these are the same numbers. In your system, do I need to describe my height as 1.74 m, or 1 m 8.4 dm, or 1 m 8 dm 5 ddm, or 250ddm? (Using my made up units of 1m=12dm, 1dm=12ddm). And it took me a minute with a calculator to do this conversion.
When you’re using a base, you should use the base. That’s why base-12 units should be accompanied by digits ‘A’ and ‘B’ (it’s not that hard), and why the base-2 use of inches (halfs, quarters, etc.) should be done in binary.
I’m not sure why people would gravitate to new or unused units, but Google is pretty magical for what you’re thinking. Type, eg, “160 lb to stones” or “3.54 square lightyears to hectares.” They just need to get the farads to dickgirths conversion working.
Uh, these are all by definition. It’s not like it magically came out that way.
And doesn’t one calorie of heat raise the temperature of one cc of water by one degree Celsius (or something like that)?
But I digress. For all the “coolness” of Plank units, it provides no unit to measure that coolness, which, of course, can only be measured in Megafonzies.
Can we go back to cubits and stadia?
You meant millifonzies.
They’re approximately the same for sufficiently small masses of cats.
So how long does that make my post count then? 
Every graphic designer from the old school has (and doesn’t use) a Schaedler Decimal Inch ruler (see “B” on this page.)
Let’s reduce it to one of the absolute values:
c = 14,276,700,168,192,000 inches per fortnight
I don’t see how you inherit the “beauty of metric”. One inch is still an awkward proportion of a foot in binary, something like 0.010100010110000101… It’s not like it suddenly becomes 0.1 of a foot… You can try base 12, but that only works for the foot/inch conversion.
If I understand the OP correctly, he’s not proposing to replace inches with some other system of fractions of a foot. Rather, he’s proposing a new way to express fractions of an inch. Since fractions of an inch are usually given in powers of two (half, quarter, eighths, sixteenth, etc.), you could express that using a binary place system. In the following examples, I will use the backslash \ rather than a decimal point to avoid confusion with decimal places.
So for instance half an inch would be 0\1 and one and half inches would be 1\1
One quarter of an inch would be 0\01, one eighth would be 0\001, one sixteenth would be 0\0001, and so on down to the smallest standardized sizes.
Three-quarters of an inch would be 0\11, five-eighths of an inch would be 0\101, etc.
Yes, the OP is addressing the fact that it is difficult to express binary fractions in the decimal system. That is a disadvantage of decimal, but it has little to do with metric system per se. It would be nice if we had six fingers on each hand and therefore had settled on base 12, but we don’t.
:sniff: No response to my last question?
This list is a little disingenuous. No one in the states really uses the gill, the hand, the chain, the cubit, the stick, or the hundredweight, and everyone in the world (or close enough) uses the week.
I remember using an Engineer’s Rule in the two drafting classes I took (one in high school and one in college). One of the scales has inches divided decimally: 1/10, 1/100, etc.
So you’ve never seen a recipe that calls for half a stick of butter?
And yeah, there are a lot of obscure units on that list, but just the fact that the customary system has so many obscure units is a strike against it. On a metric list, every single number would be a power of 10, and most would be a power of 1000.
There’s also the matter that some of those units aren’t obscure at all. If I have a rectangular fish tank and a tape measure, and I want to know how many gallons the tank will hold, I’m going to need to divide by 231? Who remembers that?
True!
However, it’s possible that the ‘beauty’ Erg0Sum referred to is not that everything just ‘magically’ came out so neatly, but that the people devising the system had the wisdom, or at least the aesthetic sense, to define base units in a way that proceeded from natural physical relationships.
Anyway, you can be as dismissive as you want about things that just ‘magically’ come out perfectly, but what about cat fur? Each cat, large or small, has just the right amount of fur to cover it, with two slots in just the right places for the eyes. Ha! And every day, just enough happens to fill the newspaper, not too much, not too little.
You’re talking about the Kelvin scale which, IIRC, is the official metric temperature unit, although Celsius sees quite a bit more everyday use, for obvious practical reasons. Few people have had an absolute zero experience, but everyone has been in contact with an ice cube at some point in his or her life.
The Kelvin scale is essentialy the Celsius scale, shifted along the axis. 0°K is absolute zero, but the interval between degrees is the same as the Celsius scale. Which makes it very easy to switch between the two : n degrees Celsius = n+273.15 Kelvins. None of that “multiplied by 9/5” bullshit.