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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.
It’s a beautiful standard that works wonderfully until you have to deal with any actual measurements. 210 x 297 mm - so easy to remember and divide.
Letter is 215.9mm x 279.4mm lmao
Good thing Americans don’t use metric, that sure would be an awkward size.
Well we do use a lot of unit metrics here, we just don’t use metric units. Except sometimes.
I personally use both together all the time. Now if you’ll excuse me, I seem to have misplaced my martian satellite.
No it’s 8.5 by 11.
See? Easy. Also you really have to try to get your hands on something that’s a different size. 99 percent of printer paper is Letter.
Maybe in America. Over here you won’t be able to find Letter it’s all A4.
Well yeah. The point is most people never have to interact with any other size.
Pretty much the same is true everywhere else though. A4 is just extremely common. All documents are printed in A4.
But if you want another size for a sign, blueprint or maybe a postage sticker it’s easy to get another size. If you want A5 just print the same thing twice on an A4 and cut it in half after or cut the paper in half first and then print on it.
If you want A3 you will obviously need a bigger printer (or you just tape two A4 together if it doesn’t need to look good.)
I think I screwed up the assignment somewhere? For some reason the tape sticks to my letter sheet but not my A4 sheet and my construction paper crayon drawing is still too big for them to create a proper border?
8.5" is not any easier to divide than 297mm. Try dividing 8.5" by 8. What is that? 12 pebbles and 14 glibglobs each?
1" and a sixteenth.
Ah yes - a system that uses both fractions and decimals!
Don’t bother, it seems the metric are allergic to fractions that aren’t irrational.
^/s
It’s 1.06 Which is close enough to just do 1 inch cuts. Super easy. No possible better way to do it.
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I think we’re on different levels. I’m solely here to make fun of both groups thinking they’re superior.
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Why does this satire thing have to be so hard?
The only time I ever encountered letter was when I bought the D&D starter set.
I was confused as to why the paper had this weird size. Then I remember it being a game made in the US.
Well that solves it if WOTC used it then we need to get rid of it. Burn it in a fire. And we’ll need a new standard now. We could use the ISO standard but Western Union just handed me a thousand bucks to base it off telegram cards. Oh well.
Excuse me, I believe you meant to say:
215 57/64mm x 279 38/96 mm
i mean, i’ve never needed to divide the size of a standard sheet of paper - if i need a smaller variant, i can just fold it in half and cut it. when working with paper, it’s pretty easy to do physical math, and you rarerly need something that’s perfect down to the millimetre
regarding the size- it’s just something you learn through life. school supplies lists typically specify the size of notebooks and paper you need to buy in centimetres, so year over year, you quickly learn that A4 is 22:29.7, and the slightly bigger standard notebooks are 24:32
Pretty sure you just justified Americans using Fahrenheit ;)
how so?
Arbitrary numbers become habit
i mean, celsius has arbitrary numbers too - human is 37°c, ambiant is 17°c, cooking is 180°c, etc.
You forgot the /s
A4 is rectangle with 1:sqrt(2) aspect ratio and 1/16 m^2 area.
1/16? That doesn’t seem very metric. They should have made it a tenth like everything else metric. That would be an easy system.
^/s
I don’t disagree! And in the interest of fairness I feel compelled to include an obligatory xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/2937/
300-3 isn’t that hard to remember. also i don’t know why you would need to divide it. they’re both divisible by 3 if that helps.