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It blows our hivemind that the United States doesn’t use the ISO 216 paper size standard (A4, A5 and the gang).

Like, we consider ourselves worldly people and are aware of America’s little idiosyncrasies like mass incarceration, the widespread availability of assault weapons and not being able to transfer money via your banking app, but come on - look how absolutely great it is to be European:

The American mind cannot comprehend this diagram

[Diagram of paper sizes as listed below]

ISO 216 A series papers formats

AO

A1

A3

A5

A7

A6

Et.

A4

Instead, Americans prostrate themselves to bizarrely-named paper types of seemingly random size: Letter, Legal, Tabloid (Ledger) and all other types of sordid nonsense. We’re not even going to include a picture because this is a family-friendly finance blog.

Source: Financial Times

  • beefbot
    14•27 days ago

    Not-super-fun fact: an 8.5 x 11 inch paper can be useful if you lack a ruler in an American office & you need to measure an inch or a foot.

    If you fold the paper like in an image I’ll try to attach, the hypotenuse is 12.01 inches.

    Edit: then you fold the 12.01 inch side against the 11 inch side to get a 1.01 inch measurement

    Not exact, but good enough if you need to know your neck size to buy a fancy shirt online - not that I would ever waste my corporation’s time that way!

    • @uis@lemm.ee
      39•27 days ago

      Not-super-fun fact: you can measure in metric with school notebook paper.

      Each sqare is 0.5 by 0.5 cm.

      EDIT: 0.5 cm, not mm. For measuring 0.5mm I can use 0.5 mm mechanical pencil lead.

      Also there is coordinate paper:

      0.1 by 0.1 cm. Or 1 mm grid.

      • @UntitledQuitting@reddthat.com
        41•27 days ago

        I love how that OP’s solution requires an inexact technique to achieve an even less exact measurement. Like Americans really out here being proud of the stupidest shit

      • AItoothbrushEnglish
        3•27 days ago

        I use it a lot if i need to draw something that is x long. If you do a lot of graphs for example you can use the measurements on your ruler.

        • @uis@lemm.ee
          2•27 days ago

          Correcting myself: 0.5 cm, not mm.

          For graphs you can use graph paper with 1 mm grid.

    • @derpgon@programming.dev
      13•27 days ago

      And most people here know that an A4 is 21 (exactly) by 30 (roughly) cm, which you can use (surprisingly) use for measurement aswell.

        • @elucubra@sopuli.xyz
          2•26 days ago

          Not only that, if you know your A4, you can do all paper sizes in you head: A3 has A4’s long side as it’s short side, and A4’s short side x2 for it’s long side. Rinse and repeat.

      • beefbot
        4•27 days ago

        Huh. . That’s weird. I could swear I double checked my math before I posted this One Dumb Trick online years and years ago…

        Found the mistake, I had skipped a step, updated original post