A new way forward: back to imperial measurement

We are very pleased to read that Boris Johnson has taken up our imperial measurement system suggestion ( http://bit.ly/2LIuLbr ) that we made several years ago ( http://bit.ly/36mQGNf ). This clearly offers much scope to simplify things throughout the country and gives us the opportunity to throw off the yoke of international decimalisation and return to our past not just for weights and measures in retailing (the area currently under consideration) but also for entire industries such as architecture, engineering and construction. For too many years we have laboured under the tyranny of the decimal system with the millimetre as our standard unit of measurement. We now have an opportunity to return to the 1/64, 1/32, 1/16, 1/12, 1/8, 1/4, 3/8, 1/2 and 1 inch, palm, hand, link, foot, yard, ell, fathom, rod (or pole, perch, lug), chain, shackle, cable, furlong, mile, nautical mile and league. With computerisation this nirvana is only a check box away. And if we were really forward thinking and global in our ambition, we should consider moving fully to a duodecimal system for counting which allows calculations in base 12 and will radically simplify calculations involving feet and inches (there being 12 inches in a foot). In base 12, 10 would equal 12 (thus we would have 10 inches in a foot in the new system) and we would still count as usual to 9: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 but we would need two new numbers for the old decimal 10, and 11, as these would now represent 12, and 13 in pbn (pre Brexit notation, or base 10). The opportunity to create two entirely new numbers for a new global Britain must surely be the marketing opportunity of a lifetime and will doubtless boost economic activity, provide key questions for citizenship tests, and put our country at the forefront of mathematics, computing and technology as the rest of the world races to catch up. Perhaps we should refer to greek for the new names; anoitos and thelima for example? Or old norse; sweyn and canute?

We leave it to our readers to discover other benefits such as the 20 hour day, the 10 month year, the 260 degree circle etc. and to suggest other suitable names for the two new imperial numbers.