Following up to myself, the document I mentioned below turned out to
be _The Jefferson Report 1790_ "Plan for establishing uniformity in
the Coinage, Weights, and Measures of the United States."
Here's a link to the full text:

<http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Gene_Nygaard/t_jeff.htm>

One of the most interesting aspects to my mind is that Jefferson as
Secretary of State probably had many things on his mind, nonetheless
he completed the report in less than three months, including
unavoidable delays and a revision necessitated by more or less
concurrent developments in Europe! At an optimistic guess, I reckon
a team of modern Government bureaucrats would need three to five years
to achieve as much!

[ Not much to do with cooking now so followups set to aus.science ]

In article >,
(Phred) wrote:
>In article >, "Bob (this one)"
> > wrote:
>>-- [someone else] wrote:
>
>[ Very big snip of lots of interesting stuff. ]
>
>>> The common pop-conception that ten is basic to human is often accepted
>>> without consideration by those who do not have to lead, but merely follow
>>> and hold onto a technical touchstone. There is no one sytem that is better
>>> than another for all things - thus mankind has many systems of numbers.
>>
>>Sure they do. But ease of utility has made base 10 far and away the
>>most common. Look at metric, look at currencies, look at
>>classification systems from libraries to factory inventory.
>>
>>As for it's being "basic to human," I don't thinks anyone has said
>>that. Merely that it's easier to calculate with it.
>
>G'day Bob,
>
>I'm curious about this -- are you sure there's something intrinsically
>"easy" about base 10; or is it just that it's been drummed into us
>since birth almost?
>
>I mean, wouldn't arithmetic be equally "easy" in octal, for example?
>0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,10,12,13,14,15,16,17,20,21,22,. .. etc.
>(Bearing in mind that the actual symbols used don't *have* to be our
>familiar 1's, 2's, 3's ... )
>
>Incidentally, some time ago I stumbled on a very interesting outline
>of the development of standards of measurement in the US. If I can
>rediscover the link, I'll post it -- but so far my memory is not up to
>the task when confronted with gigabytes of "information" and thousands
>of "favo[u]rites". 8-)
>
>Cheers, Phred.
>

Cheers, Phred.

--
LID