>>Reading about this its interesting how things can have a different meaning.
>>
>>So a UK hundredweight is 122 lbs or 8 stone and a us hundredweight is 100lbs
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>>20 hundredweight in a ton so a US ton is 2000 lb and a uk ton is 2240 lb
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>>Can't imagine thats ever caused confusion:-)
>
>I just love the US prefernce for nice round numbers. Like rounding the inch to be easier to convert from/to metric units, to exactly 25,40000 mm. The Germans, OTOH, went rough and made their Zoll 25mm, and Pfund 500g. No wonder they had so many problems with that.

There are various reasons why one might want to have "odd-sounding" values such as 12. One is that it's easy to divide into a number of different values (it can be evenly divided into halves, thirds, quarters and sixths). Numbers like 60 are useful because of the large number of divisors, making it convenient to evenly subdivide into may different portions.

On the topic of strange-looking values... One of the things that had puzzled me was the Chinese abacus and why each column had two five beads and five ones (the Japanese variant only has one five bead). It wasn't until sometime later that I found out that there were a number of measurements that were based on quantities of 16. Now fancy that -- one could use a centuries-old implement to do arithmetic in hexadecimal (while with an electronic pocket calculator, you'll have a difficult time unless you have a specific model designed for computer use).

On a similar topic -- apparently there were some cultures that were using octal base. This does seem strange, considering that humans have 10 digits. Then it was demonstrated to me how octal came about - count the spaces *between* the digits of each hand.