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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.
How does that work? 8.5^2 + 11^2 is 193.25, square root of that is 13.9. Where does 12.01 come from?
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
Oh, that makes a lot more sense now.