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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.
Arbitrary numbers become habit
i mean, celsius has arbitrary numbers too - human is 37ยฐc, ambiant is 17ยฐc, cooking is 180ยฐc, 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