[dragontamer]

All of the english system measurements were built on "human" terms.

A furlong is the distance a horse can plow in one day. This also gives a relationship between horsepower and furlongs. A chain is the distance you keep crops apart, and one chain by one furlong is an acre.

If you had 20 acres of land, you knew a horse could plow the land in 20 days.

The aging English system of Feet, Yards, Furlongs, Miles, Rods, Chains, Acres, Horsepower... they don't mean anything to non-farmers. So, we can replace these with a different system: the Metric system.

However, everyone uses the Point / Pica (1/72th an inch, and 1/6th an inch respectively) system for font measurement. As we are computer literate people today, font-size measured in "points" is quite important.

12-Point font (aka, font one pica in size) is a standard font size. No one cares that 12-points is really 4.233 mm. Hell, saying 4.233mm font means nothing to me.

But the day, night, moon, and sun cycles (approximated by day, month and year) is obvious to everyone. As such, an arbitrary 10-base system like Metric Time ignores the "reality" for most people... that the day, moon, and sun are related.

[Someone]

Nitpick: horsepower is not an old English unit; James Watt invented it in the late 18th century (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsepower)

[Crito]

I doubt most people understand or think of "Point" as a measure of length. It is just some completely arbitrary scalar that exists only due to poor UI design and so that teachers can mark off points for it not being set to "12". In many other cases, such as modern web browsers, it is being replaced with the concept of "zoom" which just uses natural numbers with "100" being arbitrarily defined as some loose concept of "default".

They would certainly never dream of using it for anything other than choosing how large they wanted their font, or possibly line.