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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.
Aside from the 1 to √2 ratio, the area of A0 paper is exactly 1m². People behind ISO 216 thought of everyting.
From their website: “We’re ISO, the International Organization for Standardization. We develop and publish International Standards.”
Sadly, ISO in recent decade started to do bullshit. They don’t pay for standard development, they don’t employ anyone for standard development, they collect membership fees from national standards organizations, require payment to download most standards and don’t allow to copy published standards. Also they retroactively paywalled a lot of standards.
People behind ISO 216 thought of everyting
how to make a good standard:
step 1: copy from DIN
Well, Germans are pretty anal about standards (thankfully) and they do them right, so why not copy them?
so why not copy them?
oh, I totally agree with you.
In fact standards are made to be copied. That’s like the entire point of them.
Wait, the US genuinely doesn’t use A4 etc.?
We have trouble fitting all our freedom on your kooky, internationally-recognized sizes
Here’s a comparison using the most sensible units possible:
Ngl as a Canadian, I implicitly thought 8.5x11 was A4. Well that’s dumb, we should switch.
I’m British and you are not alone, worse still, I spent a year in the USA and never even noticed.
Also, I’m pretty sure A4 runs through an American printer just fine.
Letter paper (8.5" x 11" | 215.9mm x 279.4mm) is kinda sorta pretty close to A4 (8.27" x 11.69" | 210mm x 297mm) so without having the two next to each other, it can seem like A4 is just a funny piece of letter, and vice versa. But to answer the actual question, USA and Canada (and apparently the phillipines???) use the “North American Standard” which is a terrifying mess in comparison to the beauty that is the ISO standard.
Edit: typos
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!
And most people here know that an A4 is 21 (exactly) by 30 (roughly) cm, which you can use (surprisingly) use for measurement aswell.
21x29.7
This number is permanently stored in my memory, just like 1€ = 6.55957F
I didn’t know Euro and Farad were related :O
Let’s not even start with the metric system (used everywhere) and the imperial system (used in the usa and some african countries).
The best part is the US Military and NASA both use metric. I love that fact.
Except for the UI.
During the Apollo program they had very limited computer capacity in the capsule and lander. Computers were huge machines back then and they had to fit one in a spaceship.
The Apollo computers used metric internally for all calculations. Anything shown to the astronauts however was in imperial, as metric was apparently too complicated for astronauts to comprehend. They had to waste precious computer capacity converting to imperial because even astronauts can’t handle anything else.
