alt-text
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 โ2 ratio, the area of A0 paper is exactly 1mยฒ. People behind ISO 216 thought of everyting.
Which is awesome, because every number up halves the size. This, combined with the standard way that paper weights are given (e g. 80g/m2) allows you to easily calculate how much a piece of paper weights: 1 A4 80g/m2 weighs 5g (1/2^4 * 80g)
Now it makes even more sense!