10 is a special number in the real world, or else why does everyone use the metric system?
Because although polydactylism is dominant, it's rather uncommon.
I'm just saying it's not unreasonable to interpret "log" as base 10 log, since it means natural log only to mathematicians, and to everyone else natural logs are written as "ln".
Huh, I'll have to tell the dozens of non-mathematicians I know who use 'log' for log base e that they're doing it wrong.
It seems kind of weird that the people who are experts in the field are the ones who supposedly have this part of their field wrong.
Seriously, though, it's just a convention thing, like driving on the right (or left), which variable name i assigned to the radial or azimuthal angle in spherical coordinates (or actually, to anything ever), etc. It's not really that one way or the other is 'right' or 'wrong', but different people have different, rather ingrained at this point, conventions.
Incidentally, the reason I like 'log' to be base e is that the only times I've ever seen where the base on a logarithm hasn't been arbitrary, it needed to be e (or sometimes base 2). But this is not important compared to being able to understand what is what.