Paper sizes explained | Number Hub with Matt Parker | Head Squeeze
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 พ.ย. 2013
- Have you ever wondered why A4 is the way it is? Well Matt Parker has sorted it all out for you.
Two A4's side by side make an A3. Two A3's side by side make an A2. Two A2's together make an A1 and two A1's together make a A0. Almost like magic isn't it? Well it isn't. As Matt Parker explains the A4 paper scale is based on a meter and one meter is exactly one forty millionth of the circumference of the earth.
How does that compare to the US paper sizes? Well you have ledger which is seventeen inches by eleven inches. And then there is tabloid which is eleven inches by seventeen inches. (Are you beginning to see the similarities as well?) Then there is legal which is eight and a half inches by fourteen inches, and Junior legal which is eight inches by five inches.
Are you metric or imperial? Let us know in the comments below!
Or are you writing a letter to a friend with your UK or US sized paper and realise you have no one to write to? Why not check out Hannah's Fry Number Hub on how popular you really are: • How Popular are You? |...
Got a Dear John letter? Feel like you need to burn it? Have a look at James May's video on What fire is. • What is fire? | James ...
/ headsqueezetv
th-cam.com/users/subscription_c... - บันเทิง
Matt is right, A0 is one meter squared in area, but we got the graphics wrong!
The A0 dimensions are 1189 X 841 mm or 46.8 X 33.1 inches!
It is not one metre squared ie 1m x 1m.
It is though, 1 square metre in the proportion of 1 x root 2.
The difference can be best illustrated by 2 metres squared which is 2m by 2m = 4 sq metres, and 2 square metres which are 2 x 1 square metre = 2 square metres
@Norman Sharples I'm not totally agreeing with you. The comment you are replying to does a better job of illustrating that they made a mistake and what it was, then you. It's more like you fog up a resolved issue. :)
@BBC Earth lab: that mistake is almost unforgivable. But worse: why is no card placed over that in 7 years?
Inches? Get those out of here!
Huh… I thought I was stupid…
@@snatermans I don't think card overlays work on TH-cam videos anymore.
"Junior Legal: That's what you use when you're suing a child." Totally lost it at this point. Love your work mate.
I'm not sure but I think he might not like the American paper system
The only defense of it that I can think of is that it would be extremely hard and very expensive to switch to the metric system
+Procyon B. yes but that was a long time ago now we have a lot of expensive equipment that would need to be replaced as well as no one likes to change
+Mr Amazing no need to replace any equipment, equipment is already made to take both sizes of paper, all you need is to stop producing american sized paper, and use up whats already available (so no paper is wasted) than when replacing broken equipment, replace with equipment that uses A system.
+Mr Amazing except that all printers sold in Europe (!) can deal with the Letter paper size just fine, same with copiers
so exactly what kind of "expensive equipment" can't deal with paper that's just 5.9mm slimmer?
I didn't think American printers could use the a 4 system and printers are expensive
1:00 A0 is equal to one square meter, but of course it's not 1 meter by 1 meter :)
Leandro Pardini that's a clever way of calculating it, didn't even think of that
Actually, the ISO 216 defines three different type of sizes (A, B and C) all of which are defined by their 0 size.
As explained in the video, an A0 has the a 1m² surface and it's width x is defined by the equation
1000 000 = x² *sqrt(2)
(the ration between the length and the width being sqrt(2), the surface (in mm²) is equal to the product the width and the length or the product of the square of the width and sqrt(2)).
B0 is defined by a width of 1m, the ratio still being sqrt(2).
Finally, C0 is the geometrical mean of the 2 others (thus keeping the sqrt(2) ratio).
Yeah, otherwise it'd be a square. Apparently, also something cool about it is that A0 has the same RATIO as A1, A2, A3, A4 etc
It's length x width = 1 and length/width = sqrt(2)
Harm Prins And also A4 cut into two is A6
The video misses one of the most important features of the A4 system: paper weight. If you have to send a (physical) document made of several sheets of paper by mail, you'll be charged by weight. How to make a budget for that, or how to choose paper for that? With A4 system it's a piece of cake: paper is being sold with a known weight in grams (again, metrical system) for each A0 sheet (square meter), so let's say, a "80 g/m2" paper means that an A4 sheet weights exactly 80/16 = 5 grams, the your 250 pages document will weight 1,25 kg without need of a balance at hand, and if you want it to weight less than a kilogram, then you do the opposite to find out you have to buy A4 sheets of 64 g/m2 or less. To do the same with the imperial measure, well... you better start googling it.
And you even have a correlated envelopes measuring system, called the "B" system.
And why does the C-series paper size exist?
Boogster Su Different cathegories for different uses. There is A, B, C, D and more
Boogster Su C sizes are for envelopes, who need to be a little wider to accept for three-dimensional expansion for taking up several folded A sheets.
Except, uh, that's just the nature of paper. It's sold with a known weight here too
Keiya, yeah, but you only need to know the density when dealing with the A series, since the area of each sheet is trivial. With US sizes you need to calculate the area of the sheet of paper to know its mass.
"you don't get a different sized paper by rotating it slightly" 😂😂
In america you do ;)
@@sysghost The grain runs in different directions. Not the same at all when you have to work with it.
American paper sizes are like american political parties.
@@kykk3365 lol illuminati confirmed!
@@beauwilliamson3628 : Yes, the grain runs in different directions. And that's why in printing and bookbinding we use notions like short grain and long grain, instead of relying on an ambiguous distinction nobody actually makes - because how the grain runs depends on how the sheet of paper was cut, not on whether you orient it with the short or the long side towards you.
I laughed so hard when Matt said "doesn't sound like freedom to me"
Alan Douglas Pretty much sums up the US as a whole.
Well the US intelligence services and police authorities don't look like to be suffering from a lack of freedom in their job.
You can go as large as you want only the size of the printer stops you.
As a technician, I have to admit: I *love* the A4 scale. It´s convinient, logical, predictable. The best part for technical drawings: if you scale it down two A sizes, you end up with a legit ratio again - every distance on the paper is then just half the original size.
+Franz Reischl (Dragon's Advocate)
I know. My company's CAD standard size is architectural D size paper, which is 24" high by 36" wide. We rarely print on this size paper, because of how wasteful it would be to print every iteration.
Instead, everything gets printed on 11"x17" for the run of the mill drawing review. That means a full size drawing gets printed at 44% of its scale to fit on this size paper. And it also makes it incredibly difficult to measure off of the bar scale on the drawings. 2" on the drawing bar scale at full size intends to indicate (perhaps 100 ft) in real life. The original bar scale now shrinks to 0.88 inches, and now 0.88" represents 100 ft in real life. I don't have a ruler that is calibrated to easily count in 0.88 inches to use for interpreting this bar scale.
However, if it were shrunk at exactly 50% to the review size, it would be a lot more intuitive to preserve the functionality of a drawing scale.
never got used to something different. in a nutshell: everyone else printing and scaling JUST WORKS! ;)
No one even uses the scale on the drawings. The drawings say do not scale the drawings. And the scale factor requires three or more unit conversions to use.
Don't you still end up with a 'legit ratio' whatever that means after one scaling?
One of the beauties comes in technical drawings. Pen sizes come in 1mm, 0.7mm, 0.5mm, 0.35mm, 0.25mm. So if you're drawing on A3 in 0.7mm, you can photocopy and scale it down to A4 and then continue drawing in 0.5mm and the lines will still have the same thickness.
In America they come in screw making sense sizes 5H - 6B.
Wouldn't they have to be 2^(-1/2) mm though?
@@aethylwulfeiii6502pens? not pencils?
"Doesn't sound like freedom to me!"
yes because a locked aspect ratio is freedom instead of just making what ever paper you want
That line gets me everytime. lol
+Sam McWhannel the a4 paper plus the a5 paper is a3.5!
Don't forget that it's quantized and the lengths of the sides are impossible to memorize.
+HollywoodF1 all you need to do is think about 7 & 3.
A4 = 297 X 210 = (300 - 3) X ( 3 X 70)
"The only rational irrational choice when it comes to paper sizes" is a fantastic line!
The subtitles didn't get the joke, unfortunately...
😂😂👍👍
It's also particularly convenient to have 80g/m^2 paper as the most common type for printer paper, as that makes one sheet of A4 have a mass of exactly 5.000g.
If you ever want to know how many sheets of paper you have in a stack, just weigh it.
Since a regular DL or C6 envelope is made from roughly one sheet of A4 paper, and letters (at least in Germany) can weigh up to 20g or 50g depending on the stamp you use, that also means you can send letters with up to 3 or 9 pages and don't need a scale to know what stamp to use.
"someone really has pulled that out of their ASSumption" Ahahahha very slick Matt >.
that's wat you use when you are sueing a child.
That got me too haha
wait, it's not? I just said to myself "well. Americans are weird, so maybe it's true" and didn't think much about it
@@YoniIsrael me too, kkk
5:10 "If you are suing someone." .. Gimme a break. This is the US we are talking about. You should have said "When you are suing someone."
Hey, I've only sued one company, and it wasn't my fault. They sued themselves on my behalf.
Assuming you are sueing someone who isnt a child though, thats no guarantee.
i see you didnt get the joke martin..
Dude, this ain't the 90's
He Ka Can we stop making Americans the butt of every joke!
The drawing for A0 is inaccurate. It's not a square, it's a ratio of 2 to sqrt(2), just like every A# paper.
+TristanBomb 2/sqrt(2) is actually just sqrt(2), but other than that you are right.
+TristanBomb It's because Matt said "1 meter square" rather than "1 square meter".
+jesusthroughmary He said ‘1 metre square*d*’ :-)
+Jan Sten Adámek But the drawing reads 1 metre by 1 metre, which is incorrect as TristanBomb stated.
+Leandro Pardini I don't understand what you're trying to say here. A0 paper is not 1000*1000mm, as people have been saying.
Do you think the Audi A1 is twice the size of the Audi A2?
+Kishore Shenoy I've never heard of the Audi A1 or the Audi A2, but I'm going to guess no.
Just cut from the middle
Yes. As a german, I can certify for this to be the case
A4: Vorsprung durch Technik
@@onetom2222 naja nach der DIN Vorgabe sollte A1 eh größer als A2 sein… A2 hat folgende abmaße: 3826 / 1673 / 1553 und der A1: 4029/1740/1409
Weshalb die Audi Nomenklatur in diesem Fall verwirrt aber der DIN A zuspricht….
also Ende gut alles gut
As an American, I support A4 and the measurement of meters(metres? One step at a time). But not everyone is so open-minded.
actually in europe apart from england where we use the metric system is is spelled meter ^^
Except for French where it's metre, which is where the UK got the spelling from
tbh you can spell it either way
meter is the measuring device. metres the unit
@@theamazedmaze4826 You can't spell it either way. The BIPM officially spells the units as "metre" and "litre" and the prefix as "deca-" in the English language, so everyone must follow it. The Americans, being the pointlessly stubborn and rebellious people they are (I'm American btw), spell it incorrectly.
Being able to half A4 to make two A5's is so incredibly useful when you're printing stuff and don't want to waste paper. After all, in a lot of cases, especially when what you're printing out is a projector presentation, you don't need the full font size to read it clearly. Being able to easily fit 2, 4 or even 8 pages on one side of paper is just so handy.
But that is also true of US paper. I don't understand this video, it's blatantly wrong, and a lot of comments are suggesting that only the metric papers scale up or down. Just as the A size papers are all halves of a much larger sheet, the letter paper is one fourth a sheet of E paper (34x44 inches).
A case analogous to what you are talking about: to make two letter pages on one single sheet of paper, you just use 11x17 paper (size B paper), which, in landscape orientation produces 17x11, which, folded, produces 8.5x11.
Likewise, a folio (a sheet folded once producing four pages) of letter paper ("A" paper) is equivalent to a quarto (a sheet folded twice producing eight pages) of tabloid paper (B paper). And an octavo of C paper produces 16 pages of letter paper in folio size.
Yes, we have some nicknames for particular orientations, and we have some custom sizes for particular paper holders, but we use the exact same system of using fractions of a larger sheet of paper to get the standard piece of paper, it's not random or arbitrary at all.
First you say, that you don’t understand the video. That’s fine, and acknowledging that is a good start. But your conclusion isn’t „I should educate myself“ or „I should ask for an explanation“, your conclusion is, that the video must be „utterly wrong“. Sorry, but that’s not how the word works. Just because you don’t understand things, it doesn’t mean that they are wrong.
Even though you don’t seem to be interested in understanding, let me try to explain it anyway: Of course you can put two letter sheets next to each other, to get a sheet twice the size. That will work with every size of paper, no matter what. But your new sheet doesn’t have the same aspect ratio. Letter has an aspect ratio of 1:1.29 whereas B has a ratio of 1:1.55, so if you have designed your poster to fit on a letter sheet, and you try to print it on B, you’ll either get a distorted image or a lot of white space on the top and bottom of the page.
On the other hand, A3, A4, A5 and so on, all have the same aspect ratio, so you can use exactly the same design for a flyer (A5), a magazine (A4), a poster (A2) or a billboard (A0). That only works for the one specific aspect ratio, that the A-System uses, which is 1:square root of 2.
Opps! Sorry about that!
Matt is right, A0 is one meter squared in area, but we got the graphics wrong.
The A0 dimensions are 1189 X 841 mm or 46.8 X 33.1 inches!
whatever, any kind of paper still beats rock
Not if said rock is a paperweight
One of the fun things of living in Mexico is how we're stuck between metric and imperial. Our official system is metric, every single mexican uses meters, grams, liters, etc. _But_ the sizes of products, sheets, industrial materials, screws, holes, etc, are almost all in imperial D: I have no freaking idea why. It makes designing for industry really complex in here.
So for instance, when Americans buy a sheet of wood to make a table, they usually buy a 4x8 feet sheet, and the table they build with it is also measured in feet or inches. All fine and good until there.
But _here_ in Mexico, our sheets of wood are also made in imperial dimensions, yet our everyday use of said wood is with metric dimensions. So for me, a sheet of wood is not 4x8', instead, it is approximately 122x244 cm! (which is just one of many weird imperial/metric conversion numbers you literally have to memorize during school as a strange rite-of-passage to be able to work in manufacturing)
Oh, and notice how I said _approximately_ ? That's where it gets fun. There's mountains of waste material when building _any_ product because the measurements for your product _never_ match up nicely with the measurements of your sheets of wood/metal/etc.
So please 'merica. If you won't change your industry to metric for yourself, do it for us. It will make life _so_ much easier in here, south of El Rio Bravo
In Europe the diameter of car wheels and tires are in inches, the width and height of tires in mm (no exceptions)
Wood is sold in 4 x 8 feet (we're starting to see exceptions to that.)
@@persisto77 Phone, computer and TV screens are inches too, and hard drive ( solid state drives size are measured by the har drive platter size. - I suggest people start using cm or mm, but people refuse to change over to metric. Even Europeans refuse to switch over to metric.
@@Liggliluff I tried to point out the use of différent units on the same item.
@@persisto77 Wood is sold in mm or cm in Euripe. Maybe you are talking about the UK?
It's because of your beligerant neighbor...
I want A4 paper in America now.
It's available, it's just "non-standard" here. You can buy it anywhere you can buy legal paper, and all printers have a setting for it.
***** Well, then, I want it to be the standard.
+Death's Heir It is already international standard. ISO 216.
+Death's Heir
You can just start using it now and show it to your friends. Don't wait for your government! :-)
+Death's Heir Fight for change! Change that entire horrific system of yours to the metric system while your at it hahaha
Matt is right, A0 is one meter squared in area, but we got the graphics wrong!
The A0 dimensions are 1189 X 841 mm or 46.8 X 33.1 inches!
Sorry about that!
missing about 51m^2
*METRIC SYSTEM*
How much does one liter of Water weigh? *1* kilo
At how many degrees does water boil? *100* C
At how many degrees does water freeze? *0* C
1 meter *=* 100 Centimeters
1 kilometer *=* 100,000 centimeters
*IMPERIAL SYSTEM*
How much does a gallon of water weigh? *3.3454* pounds
At how many degrees Fahrenheit does water boil? *212* F
At how many degrees Fahrenheit does water freeze? *32* F
1 yard *=* 36 inches.
1 mile *=* 63,360 inches.
*LETS GO ON A METRIC CRUSADE! CONVERT OR DIE!*
A gallon of water weighs about 8.8 lbs.
+jcnash02 8.3
+AterCanusAlbus Honestly I wish we were at least taught Metric equally to Imperial. Science is all essentially in Metric and it's a huge hit for those of us trying to learn it later in life for science majors. I can easily estimate in inches and feet but say centimeters? A lot more difficult for me to envision since I didn't grow up with it. US needs to start converting but it will be difficult for industrial processes I think that rely on inches.
+AterCanusAlbus
No amount of anything "weighs" 1 kilo, because kilo is just a prefix.
Second of all, no amount of anything "weighs" 1 kilogram, because kilograms are a unit of mass, not weight.
Third, there is no condition of water that has exactly a density of 1 kilogram/liter. You can tell that we intended this to be, but in reality, the drift of measurement errors in history makes it such that the maximum density of water is 999.9720 kg/m^3.
+Joseph B.
We are. Anyone who takes teaching measurement systems seriously, will teach you both.
It is more a matter of what are you accustomed to using as a unit for thinking, than what units you know.
I thought they switched the metre's basis to the speed of light?
Geoffrey Lim they did
how do they define one second then? halflife of something?
fejfo's games It's based on the rate of decay of cesium 133 atoms.
Actually not the rate of decay, but how fast the atoms 'vibrate'. And you are correct, the meter/metre started out as 1/40.000.000 the circumference of the earth.
If I remember correctly, the length of a meter is currently defined as a specific number of wavelengths for light with a specific colour/frequency.
1 meter: The length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.
1 second: The duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyper fine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.
You didn't even go into the magnificence of the B and C ISO series (they aren't very common outside of specific uses, but they're still usefull)
The B series is the geometric mean between 2 of the A sizes such that B0 is 1m×sqrt(2)m B1 is ½sqrt(2)m×1m, B2 is 0.5m×½sqrt(2)m etc. they're often used for professional printing where they can then trimm off the excess, since a printer usually isn't able to print right up to the edges of a piece of paper.
The C series is the geometric mean of the corresponding A and B size (i.e. C# is the geometric mean of A# and B#) which means that C# is slightly larger than A# which makes it an ideal envelope size for a piece of A# paper (or single folded A(#-1) paper), and B# is slightly larger than C# which makes B# a suitable envelope size to a piece of C# paper. C zises are therefore usually used for envelopes for the corresponding A size of paper (although they're often marketed with the A size they're intended for, but their actual measurements usually follow the C series)
Actually, B can be defined simpler than that.
B0 is actually 1m wide and keep the ratio sqrt(2).
yeah, but that is simply the result of it being the geometric mean, which is the official definition
Didn't know it was the official definition. I assume it makes more sense, in terms of regulations to define a standard based on an other one.
Thanks for the information.
no problem :)
In Japan B5 is pretty popular
1:00 Why is the A0 show as being 1m x 1m, this is incorrect.
Jake Harrison you forgot the question mark
To indicate it's 1 m^2. Though writing those measurements wrongly is quite misleading.
never did I think I could be so entertained by a video about paper.
I need to get a ledger compatible printer, mine only prints tabloid
"Pulled out of their ASSumption" LOL
It's funny how America mocks the rest of the world
but when we mock the Americans they flip out!
We flip out because we are so rational you know. We used our rationality to vote in George Bush 43. We also for the most part deny evolution and want to teach creationism in our schools to insure the future rational ideas of our generation (wink wink). We drive on the correct side of the road and use the most up to date measurement system (imperial units). We usually wait for a war to be half finished before jumping in and claiming total victory (ie WWII) Yes we Americans are way more rational then those in the rest of the planet. I just wish we could see how silly we really are. We do need to be able to laugh at ourselves from time to time. And as an American I can definitely see the joke.
James Tuvell Actually, Americans do drive on the correct side of the road. Much of the world and most all of Europe drives on the right side, like America.
***** Like Always.
X-Zaaevyer Xatzimi That doesn't make it the CORRECT side. Actually there is no correct side but the right side of driving was an act of revolution against Britain and somehow the most of the world started following that.
viralpatelify Originally when most travel was done on horseback people tended to ride on the left side to keep the sword arm in an advantageous position in case the person passing you suddenly decided to attack. I guess they are still wary of driveby shootings since they decided to put the steering wheel on the right side of the car. To fortify this theory further, UK and Australia both removed peoples right to own firearms so there must have been a substantial amount of driveby shootings which they decided to keep under wraps to avoid losing tourist income.
Why does America not use the metric system? Wouldn't it be a lot easier to use in science, etc.?
It would be easier everywhere. But I reckon they like to use, 45 different units with different sizes, all arbitrary amount of distance from each other, used in random professions. Instead of 10 set the same distance from each other and used in every profession.
Actually the U.S.A. does use the metric system. You'd be hard pressed to find an engineer or scientist that performs their calculations using the imperial system. In general, it's really only the general public that uses the imperial system in the U.S.A..
***** That is true, the thing is... Why isn't it taut in school?
It is taught in schools but it's hard for kids to keep it in their heads when the imperial system is used exclusively in daily life. The only way is for it to be a political mandate like Canada.
Its because Americans like Barley Corn
I have a whole new appreciation for A4 paper sizes
The difference between tabloid and ledger is the grain of the paper.
Almost every type of paper has a specific grain, usually, parallel to the longest dimension.
The grain of the paper can influence its behavior; for example, paper that is folded with the grain has a smoother crease and is less prone to cracking than paper that is folded against the grain.
"Doesn't sound like freedom to me" - Brilliant.
I work at a government supply store, and I was wondering where 8 1/2 x 11 had come from. I noticed a weird pattern by weight with the paper. First, they come in reams of 500 at 7.5 grams per square meter. So one ream is just shy of 5 pounds.
These reams of paper come in cases of ten, making a case weigh about 50 pounds when you factor in the cardboard case and the paper sealing each ream.
These cases, then, are shipped on palettes of 40, meaning one palette of of this paper weighs one ton.
I was rambling on to one of my coworkers about paper for half an hour supposing that perhaps the origin of the odd 8.5'" x 11'" standard was actually derived from shipping the paper by tonnes, which could be broken down into all those other nice, neat numbers.
That would also depend on the weight of the paper. All reams are 500 sheets but the g/M2 varies so thicker paper would be more than your 5lb...I tend to use 10 to 12g/M2 paper myself.
@@diceman199 With U. S. paper, pounds refers to the weight of four reams of U. S. letter-sized paper (four reams of 20 pound paper will weigh 20 pounds). I prefer to use 24 pound paper myself.
@@Solitaire001 You’ve got that switched round. The pound predates letter sized paper. It’s the weight of the paper which is defined by the pound not the pound that is defined by the paper.
Why do Americans use 81/2" X 11" letter size paper? Here is the history:
Early paper makers dipped wooden framed screens, or molds, of various sizes into vats of water and pulp. These “vat men” would then heave them back out - all by hand - and once they’d left them to dry, they’d end up with two large sheets of paper. One of the common sizes that came about, according to industry folklore, was a size that was about 44 inches wide,” said Mark Pitts, the association’s executive director of printing-writing, pulp and tissue.
Cut that 44 inches in half, twice, and you end up with paper 11 inches long. Some of the original paper making molds live on at the Robert C Williams Museum of Paper making at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. They carry evidence of the paper maker’s outstretched grip in the form of wear on the wooden sides, which are often reinforced with copper.
You can just imagine 30 or 40 years of somebody using the same tool everyday, and how it’s really formed to fit their hands by that point.
As offices became increasingly mechanized with the introduction of the typewriter, photocopier and printer, the need for paper at a fixed size grew, and 8.5 x 11 inches became standard “letter” paper. In reality, it was the Dutch who came up with the 44" sheets of paper over 400 years ago. They determined that the best "cut" would be the 8.5 x 11 inches for writing paper. Old habits die hard!!!
Americans... how do they work?
By almost always using the same sized paper. Do yall really switch paper sizes that often? And when you need a bigger paper do you really always need it to be twice as big? Or when you need it smaller do you always need it half as big?
If you want something half as big are you incapable of cutting it in half and instead must buy sheets that are precut in half?
But really it's just by always using letter sized cause we dont need anything different. I will admit the ratio of your papers sounds better,
I highly doubt any American would know all of the units shown in the video and their relation to each other, both the systems of units were developed in different circumstances - one was devised by mathematicians and researchers for their use and the other by businessmen and industrialists and the royalties for their professional usage~
+Rew Rose: You make it sound as if the customary system were designed. And if it were more practical for business use. It wasn't, and it is just because it is "customary" in your culture. It is a hodgepodge of units that made sense when they were devised (nothing wrong with a carpenter using his thumb for taking rough measurements.) Which made a lot less sense once they were unified across trade systems, and which are downright ridiculous once you go into the field of engineering and even trade, when you have to do calculations with them.
It is correct that all units are arbitrary to a degree. If you just have to measure, there is no big advantage either way. But as soon as you start to combine things, to use derived units, it is a whole lot more sensible to use a system that is designed from the gorund up.
Firaro+ I started in the professional field as a draughtsman. We used all paper sizes from A4 to A0. That definitely made life a whole lot easier.But Europe is not really that standardised when it comes to stationery and printed matter. Just take a look into any bookshelf...
Duct tape and dreams.
what happens if a us citizen write to his government using a paper of the size of a us letter?
Whole world explodes.
black hole
Nothing. People write whatever paper. Its mostly for official work. But it really doesn't matter.
+Tecnovlog
It probably goes in the circular file.
The Meter was originally supposed to be 1/10,000,000 if the distance from the North Pole to the Equator. It was painstakingly measured out by hand from the North of France to the Spanish Mediterranean over many years spanning the time of the French Revolution, (which complicated matters). At that time it was thought the Earth was a perect sphere. What is truly remarkable is how close they got. There is a book called "The Measure of All Things" which is really quite fascinating.
The picture at 1:02 is wrong. While the area of the A0 is 1 m² as you say, it is not 1 m by 1 m in form as shown. The ratio between the edge lengths is always 1:√2 for A sizes, as you point out later.
You forgot that Ledger is exactly two Letter, which is nice if you're planning to fold it over into a familiar-sized booklet (or, similarly, have a magazine or book in good old letter-size-actually, usually 10.5 x 8 or thereabouts to account for margins and cutting-and want to copy a two-page spread). I admit that this is a benefit of the A system as well, but you shouldn't pretend it doesn't exist in the American system.
Also, you forgot the B and C scales, which are geometric.
Absolutely brilliant! I could never imagine such things! Thanks so much Head Squeeze people!!
I love how Matt at 1:19 is like "oh shit..." right before he starts talking about the American paper scales.
How can you claim it's the only rational size when it's based on an irrational number?
It's a play on words, making fun of the fact that the word "rational" and "irrational" have multiple meanings :)
I love this movie as well as the explanation about the imperial measurement. One small thing to correct: A0 is not 1 by 1 meter but 1 square meter. the ratio of all DIN A- paper sizes is always the same 2 : sqrt(2).
regards
Albert
you know that 1 square meter is a square of 1 meter by 1 meter...right?
sure, but 1 square meter can also be 0.5 meter by 2 meter :) - right?
Albert Dandl no, because in mathematics, a square is a square. That's why we have fancy words like rectangles.
looks like I cannot compete with your logic :). On my planet the area of ANY object is measured in square meters (even if it is not a square) :)
Albert Dandl just trolling you, don't stress so much :). I wanted to continue, but you sound like a smart polite guy, so it's not funny anymore. I have a day off, and i'm a bit bored. Please don't take it personally...i'm off to drawing the whole day. :D
I laughed while nodding along with the points raised in the video. This is not only informative but entertaining :)
Wonderful seeing someone getting so worked up over such an obscure topic. And backing it up with science too.
There are also B sizes which are exactly the same as A sizes, only bigger. Americans should adopt those.
(Technical: A0 is 1 m², B0 is 1 metre wide. They both have √2 ratio and B0 has the same ratio to A0 as A0 to B1, B1 to A1 etc. There are also C sizes which are geometric mean between A and B.)
+Jan Sten Adámek Why should they adopt these rather than the A series? I know they're equally good, but since the A series is the most speard around the world, why not use it?
+Ihategoogle+ I believe usually envelopes use C-sizes to properly fit the A paper sizes ;)
Ihategoogle+ Because they are bigger and Americans like bigger :-)
Joop Kiefte No, envelopes use special size called DL which is slightly larger than A4 folded into thirds
those too, but we have lots of envelope sizes ;) afaik full size(!) A4 document envelopes are usually C4.
Thank you for that! Very instructive (even with the error on the 1x1 sheet). I am 32 and this was explained to me in school when I was 11. Never questioned that system and it helped me so much since!
It's nice to be here on the exact 10 year anniversary of this legendary video!
I guess now I have to do this for the sequel
still slaps 10 years later, gotta love matt
Rather than using the term "A4" to describe the whole series, Matt should rather use the name of the standard: "ISO 216"
According to Wikipedia, you don't enumerate sizes above A0 as A-1, but 2A0, 4A0 and so on
Best rant on paper sizes I've ever heard. Well, might be the only rant I've ever heard on paper sizes, but still, this was brilliant ^^
"Junior Legal, that's what you use when suing a child."
I laughed way too hard at this.
Hey, thanks for the Inch and Foot measurements--both standardized by the British when they went upon trying to make the world their own.
We are just keeping the tradition alive. You are welcome!
it still sucks, keep up with the times
***** They still take tea at 4pm every day. TRADITION!
umm I don't know what you mean by that, I'm neither British nor American. I've got no dog in this fight, I simply support what works, and the metric system is clearly superior and way more organized.
***** I know. But, tradition. It's like weasle stomping day. You just can't stop it just because it doesn't work, or it is unorganized.
***** nonesense, how do you think the metric system got so popular in the first place? why by stomping out traditional systems of course! every single country back in the day used to have it's own system of measurements, so they had to keep converting between Spanish, German, Russian, etc. measurements at ports, it sucked. BTW, where do you have weasle stomping day? sounds fantastic!
That's awfully condescending from someone who thinks that a piece of paper with an area of one square meter must therefore be a square, one meter on a side. And who apparently thinks 219 mm is some sort of power-of-two fraction of one meter.
Also, while the meter was initially defined as a fraction of the circumference of the earth, the measurement was screwed up, and it was off by far more than the error margin of surveying techniques even at the time. So, no, the meter isn't any less arbitrary than any other measurement unit (it's actually defined as how far light goes in a vacuum in one over two hundred ninety-nine million and some seconds).
It isnt. The size is arbitrary, but we chose the size based on one valid fact that makes sense. At least its a nice round number.
In US the size is even more arbitrary. But thats the fault of messed up Imperial system. Those are just arbitrary numbers called by Arbitrary names, literally unusable in most professions that are using a precise, or many measurements.
More on imperial units next week! Stay tuned...
Finally got all my paper ratio related questions answered. Today was a good day.
It would be nice to see the same support for ISO 8601 - The standard to represent dates as YYYY-MM-DD. /Insincerely IT people everywhere.
I know that is makes sorting by dates easier, but it also has the disadvantage that it shows the least important info first. DD-MM /DD-MM-YYYY ftw :-)
@@fastertove at least both of those go in order... MM/DD/YYYY doesn't make sense.
@@theamazedmaze4826 Yes, MM/DD/YYYY doesn't seem to make any sence.
@@fastertove YYYYMMDD (with no dashes) makes it possible to fit dates in a number column and it makes it really easy to do computations and comparisons with them without having to use dedicated functions.
If I need to check if a date is in march 2018, all I have to do is check if it's > 20180300 and < 20180400.
If need to extract the year from a date I can just do an integer division by 10,000 and there it is. Need the month? mod(date,10000)/100. The day is just mod(date, 100).
Non-programmers understandably don't give a shit about this though so it'll never happen outside of our databases.
i would be okay with DD/MM/YYYY if some people weren't using MM/DD/YYYY. way too much ambiguity
so i use YYYY-MM-DD, i know for sure it won't get misinterpreted, and i can't misinterpret someone else's either
If A-1 is invalid notation, how would we express it in valid notation?
The beauty of the metric system is that multiplying or dividing by units of 10 is just a matter of moving the decimal one place. If you multiply by 10, move it one place to the right (27.9 x 10 = 279). If you divide by 10, move it one place to the left (279/10 = 27.9).
I tried to care about this but there are so many other, more important things in life. Thank god we have TH-cam so people can rant about paper sizes that basically have no effect on the life of the average person. If you live in the US you use inches, feet, yards, etc...the rest of the world uses the metric system. Life still amazingly goes on. How wonderful.
This doesn't cover American ANSI or ARCH sizes, which I deal with every day. ANSI C, D, and E are 17"x22", 22"x34", and 34"x44" respectfully. Then we have ARCH B through E1 which range from 12"x18" through 30"x42", sort of, since E is actually bigger than E1 at 36"x48". Anyway, these are mainly for architectural drawings and almost nobody uses the official sheet names and just says "I need these printed at 24 by 36 please."
This is all for ecological reasons: Americans will almost never make an enlarged or reduced copies. (The function is rarely used on copy machines) European do all the time.
About the ratio of square root of two being optimal for paper sizes AT 9:20: "And that's why the A paper scale is the only RATIONAL IRATIONAL choice when it comes to paper sizes." -- -- -- --Most excellent quote and the whole video. (y)
The ratio of the paper sizes also led to the change in technical drawing pen point sizes. From the initial 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1.0 they were changed to .15, 0.25, 0.35, 0.5, 0.7 and 1.0 which allowed a photocopy or printout made optimised for paper size ratio to be manually edited using the next pen size since they pen sizes were based on the same ratio
3:29 "Round" and "spherical" are not the same thing. A round (i.e. not malformed) barley corn is a fairly standard size and was extremely common. Practically anyone would have barley just lying around the cave. It was a reasonable way to make sure that the consumer and the merchant or the tax assessor and the freeman were on the same page and no one was getting cheated.
I work with barley every day. There is no better common natural thing to define a small unit of measure by. Barley was available to everyone, while the platinum rod, the wavelength of light. and the circumference of the earth are not. I have to trust that my meter is the same as yours, because I can't compare my meter to the standard. I can, however, use barley to define an inch, an inch to define a foot, a foot to define a furlong, and so on. When all measuring devices were handmade, it was a very good idea to be able to check them against the natural world.
Now that I can use a laser beam to determine how many millionths of a meter I am from the opposite wall, it might be time to go with the slightly less arbitrary, quite a bit more user-friendly Metric system.
Or go to dozenal. That would also work.
A34: homeopathic paper!
I am loving this - keep it up! The follow-up on imperial units is fantastic - using that next time I teach units of measurement.
You are so good with your speach . Really amazing. I had to hear until the end
Metric really is far superior to Imperial/US standard. The A4 paper size is actually closer to the golden ratio as well. :D
Seriously, the Number guy didn't notice that Tabloid paper is double Letter?
That's good, but the rest of the papers don't follow this constant ratio.
Stephen Morgan It is double the size, but Letter and Tabloid have different aspect ratios, which means it doesn't fulfil the role that A4 and A3 do.
For example, here in Europe, all photocopiers will typically have buttons on them that say [A4->A3] and [A3->A4]. At university, I could get an academic article where each page is A4, and open it up and photocopy two pages at a time (two pages of A4 next to each other is A3). I can hit the [A3->A4] button and everything is automatically reduced to fit perfectly on a sheet of A4 without any stretching, distorting or cropping. This is particularly useful if there are any charts or images.
With the US paper sizes, starting with letter, the short side is doubled each time you go up a step, which means that the aspect ratios alternate. Therefore, 8.5x11 actually has the same aspect ratio as 17x22, but not 11x17. So you could conceivably scale up and down with no distortions or cropping, but you have to skip up or down two paper sizes because of the alternating aspect ratios. And with the Government, Legal and Junior Legal sizes, those are completely arbitrary and don't fit into the system at all.
+Stephen Morgan
Right, but if you take something that was originally on tabloid size, and scale it to fit on letter size, it no longer fits with the same aspect ratio. Two of the margins will be different than the other two margins.
With the A0-A1-A3-A4 system of paper, no matter what size paper your content started, if you print it on a smaller size in this system, its aspect ratio will be preserved.
best vid ive seen in a long time
Description of junior legal has me laughing my head off
It is not easy being an American sometimes. I suffer from too many inches and pounds. If only I had metres and grams. All I can do is bitch. If I ask for something in a metric format they look at me like I'm crazy. So I live with it. How many probes to we have to crash into Mars before we change?
One meter is the distance light travels in1/299792458 of a second. This is a perfect definition.
Very insightful :)
The DIN A 4 letterhead size was invented by a French mathematician a few hundred years ago who found out that the sizes remain the same in ratio if you double the paper or making half of it. There is a funny incident when there was an international competition for building a huge house for an international Organisation in Berlin. Teams of the great architects came to the judging place and presented their plans, in a size of DIN A0 ( = 33 1/8 x. 46 19/24 in); the American team came with their huge plan carried by two men. The French team just took a thick folder with the normal size DIN A 4 and folded their plan from doubling the DIN A4 four times bringing the same size as the one of their American colleagues. The American won the competition and from this moment on adopted the DIN size system.
It is to my German view amazing that the American/ English measurements are kept ( troy ounce for sterling silver cutlery) despite the more practical French systems of gram, kilogram, mm, meter and km.
If it helps, Americans hate the Imperial system too. You think we like having to try and find 458/599 of an inch?
The youtube comments I'm reading say: "Yes, absolutely. And we will violently disagree with any disparaging opinions."
8:55 that graphic is wrong as well... And Matt even says at that very moment "If you put any two together you get the next size up"
Appears that neither the animator knew what he was doing nor did he even listen to what he was animating... Epic fail
+Freakschwimmer The only epic fail here is that you don't actually understand what the graphic was showing.
Stewpac, so in your mind A4 and A3 are one and the same thing? Gosh, your parents must have dropped you numerous times!
No? The dotted line includes the original A4 piece of paper in it. To me, the graphic clearly shows that the A3 piece of paper is the A4 piece of paper plus the dotted line and the A2 is the entire thing.
Stewpac, I've never looked at it that way :/ But that makes sense, ty
No worries
"Doesn't sound like freedom to me" :D
I love this guy.
I thought science was supposed to be professionally compared/contrasted and unbiased?
You're setting a great example there dude.
0:21 is root 2 rational now? Guessing it’s not exactly those measurements.
I think we have a case of Parker A4 paper
Sorry for trolling, always a fan of Matt’s content
So, what your saying is, you either have options for the dimensions of your paper you use, or your stuck making everything you do the same ratio?
Ok, so what stops you from cutting the paper?
If anyone's wondering where the sqrt(2) comes from...
Take a piece of paper of length x on the long side and y on the short side. When two of these pieces are placed next to each other so the long sides are butted against each other, the result is a piece of paper 2y on the longer side and x on the shorter side. The aspect ratio of this new twice-as-big piece of paper must be the same as that of the original single piece i.e. x/y = 2y/x. A little bit of algebra leads to x=sqrt(2) y.
5:53 "Doesn't sound like freedom to me."
Finally! A good argumentation about how Letter size paper sucks!
Haha! Really good one! I like how he warms up to the subject ;-)
He he, he is popular
We Canadians transitioned to the metric system in the 60s but have yet to adopt the A4 paper size convention. For shame.
Well done very hilarious. I liked the video
beautiful...now i can show off my new found knowledge :-)
I wrote a letter to Apple trying to get them to put the iPhone and iPad on the root-two system. I figured the iPad screen could be evenly split that way.
No response.
You would have an irrational (literally) number of pixels. Even with rounding, it would be way more difficult to deal with. Some screens would have different numbers of pixels depending on how large the ratio is
An iPad right now is 1536x2048. For a root-two ratio, how about 1632x2308? That's root-two within 0.00015%. A screen half the size could be 816x1154 with the same root-two precision. That works great! They have even numbers of rows and columns, and super neglegible rounding error. Let's do it!
Andrew Cascio Here is the usefulness--You can do this trick with landscape or portrait, but say that you're holding an iPad in portrait, and you want to open two applications. Turn it sideways, and two protrait applications can be displayed side-by-side with no adjustment to the formatting. This is uniquely possible with root-two proportioning.
Try being less of a dick and just have a discussion. The half-a-brain comment was uncalled for.
Andrew Cascio No, what I described is absolutely unique to root-2 rectangles. It doesn't work for Golden Section rectangles, or any other proportion.
That's because Apple is an Us company they don't like other ideas even when there better
ROUND barley, not SPHERICAL. Not big on geometry, are we? lol
+Jim Fortune A meter is not a 40 millionth the circumference of the Earth. A meter is the distance that light travels in 1/299792458th of a second.
carultch The meter was originally defined as 1/10^7 the distance from the North Pole to the equator on a line through Paris. It was redefined more precisely as a multiple of wavelengths of a particular frequency of light. And what has any of that to do with my comment?
CBTrigger1337 Where have I heard that before?
i love this video so much. gj
At least I now know why its always a pain to get the right aspect ratio right when putting pictures and diagrams in my papers in the US. Having to tweak it here and there to make it less goofy squished or stretched.
Why aren't we using a metric clock ...
We haven't evolved that far yet
it is metric.. It has seconds and based on that second the other units are described like meters, Amps, etc..
The French during the Revolution tried a decimal calendar and clock as well as what is now called the Metric system, however the calendar because its epoch began with the Revolution it may have been difficult to disassociate it from the French Revolution in order to be used in other countries also at the same time stoping the need for the decimal clock and is not like the calendar and current clock wasn't already mostly agreed upon in Europe at the time meaning common people didn't disagree what day it was unlike with measurements for commerce, however the current metric second would have been smaller than the decimal second of the French Revolutionary clock.
We could in theory rework the concept of the decimal clock with the metric second by using the standard prefixes (_deka-_, _hecta-_, _kilo-_, etc.) to have a truly metric daily life, let's see an hour is 3 600 seconds and a day is 86 400 seconds so an hour would be _3.6 kiloseconds_ and a day would be 86.4 kilosecs, I guess we could live like this, however the minute and hour would go and people would need to get used to the fact that now they'll live 86.4 ksec by 7 and not 24/7, or rework our 12 month calendar a bit more to suit the metric second's new daily metric time scale.
sion8 spot on
+robert hingston Well, Robert, a decimal clock system does exist and is in use everyday (in France,
and probably Germany too) in some mass-production factories. When you fabricate a car, there are thousands of operations organised in the same plant. When preparing the fabrication chain, each elementary operation is calculated (estimate based on a data-base of former fabrications) in HOURS and DECIMAL FRACTIONS of an hour. For instance, operation No C-364 is evaluated as 0,0125 hour, which is 45 seconds, as one second is 1/3600 = 0,000277777... hour, then 45 seconds = 45 x 1/3600 = 0,0125 hour.
On each drawing of a piece to be fabricated, there is the indication of "Fabrication time = " in decimal hours (0, 00125 in our case).
Then on a PERT diagram critical path (organisation of non concommitent operations) you just need to make the sum of all individual critical times (easy, as being decimal) and you get the total time to fabricate a car.
You will tell me that, today, a program on a computer can convert seconds into minutes and into hours, but in some industries, the data-base in fractions of an hour exist since ages, and it is still in use in some factories.
Have a nice day.
Maybe we should base length measurements off of the atomic diameter of the first truly stable non-radioactive synthetic man-made transuranium super-heavy element.
If you check out the current definition of a meter, it's defined as the distance traveled by light in a particular fraction of a second (which is why light travels an integer number of meters per second), and the second is defined according to the radiation of a particular type of cesium. I'm not being precise here so if you're interested look it up on Wikipedia.
It wouldn't be precise because of Uncertainty Principle.
@@gregdesouza17 The uncertainty principle has no stakes on the functioning of atomic clocks. Cesium-133 emits radiation at a defined and precise frequency, and it is that frequency which is used to time the clocks and thus define the basic second. That frequency has no specific or intrinsic uncertainty, and our own measurement instruments are capable of using this frequency to determine the second with an uncertainty of 10^-16
I want to see more of this presenter. He's fantastic! Waaaay better than the other two. As good a quality as James May.
This has actually made my day, metric ftw