There is also the Unified Network Language which the United Nations supports to provide a common language for the Web. It was designed to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which proposed that language actually shapes our thinking, as Newspeak did in George Orwell's 1984. Learn Lojban and see what new thoughts you'll be thinkin'. God only knows what's in an acre. 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 .