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All truth goes through three stages: First it is ridiculed; then it is violently opposed; finally, it is accepted as self-evident.
--Schoppenhauer
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There's nothing special about the number ten--we just happen to have ten fingers. Why be slaves to our anatomy and use ten as the basis of our number system? Base Eight or Sixteen would make much more sense. Base Sixteen (2x2x2x2) would be more compact, and it is what computers use, but the human brain can barely handle ten objects at once, let alone sixteen. Base Eight (2x2x2) would be a reasonable compromise; the little finger appears to be going vestigial anyway. Note that the Year 2000 would no longer be a big deal: 2000d = 713hd = 3720o. We would either be way past or way before the Y2K problem.
For the truly adventurous, there's Balanced Ternary. A Ternary (Base Three) number system is optimal in balancing the number of digits (e.g. too many in binary, 11010101010), with the number of symbols (e.g. too many in hex, 0-F). While ordinary Ternary uses the values of 0, 1, 2, Balanced Ternary uses -1, 0, and 1. This enables it to represent negative numbers without an additional sign. Check out the Balanced Ternary website for more fascinating details.
We are closing in on an understanding of consciousness, psychologists from one side and computer scientists from the other. IBM has just anounced plans to build a computer 1000 times as powerful as Deep Blue, which beat Kasparov at chess, and it is only a matter of time before we create minds to rival our own. For a taste of things to come, try out the Creatures 3 simulation, which you can read all about at the Creature Labs or one of the other Creatures community sites. After a few hours of watching the Norns play, you might begin to wonder who might be watching you (but instead of phosphors the pixels of your fishbowl are small vibrating 11-dimensional strings). Will a future version of the Norns on your screen ever be able wonder who is watching them? The MIT Media Lab has some interesting things happening inside, but for a walk on the wilder side check out the Illumatron or the Transhumanists at the World Transhumanist Association and the Extropy Institute, or the paradise engineers of the Brave New World.
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This archaic system has led to such embarassments as the recent loss of a $200-million Mars-bound satellite, just as it reached its destination, though the metric system is old enough for Thomas Jefferson to have been a supporter. The US will go metric the day after the Brits begin driving on the right. Standards are a good idea, but sometimes the threshold is just too high.
4000 years ago the Babylonians divided the day into 24 hours, the hour into 60 minutes, and the minute into 60 seconds, perhaps the oldest standard in use today. In later times this inelegant system achieved new heights with 365.24 days per year, requiring messy leap year corrections, grouped into 12 months of varying lengths. This situation is simply begging for an elegant metric-style solution. Vernor Vinge offers one in Deepness in the Sky.