8.5”x11” is a standard size for the US and Canada, but not for the rest of the world. Which leads to the eternal problems for any NGOs or contractors working for the US government overseas who have to source Letter size for US gov partners and A4 for local partners!

Yep. Every time I have to renew my Australian passport I have to buy a ream of A4 paper. Every time I forget where last time's ream was stored. I suspect someday I'll find thousands of sheets somewhere lost in my basement.

Deep within your subconscious memories is a series of you unloading A4 from your printer, thinking about where to best store it, finding 20 reams already there, stacking this one on top, and then promptly forgetting the location.

"I don't put things where I think they should go, I put them where I am likely to look for them" - Adam Savage

I really like this quote, but I can't find any reference to Adam Savage saying it.

Closest I can find is his concept of "First Order Retrievability"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyCrHLYiGNo

I recently watched the video where he said it, but I can't remember which one it was. It was one of the ones on the Tested channel, either an ask Adam or one of the questions from a live stream they made in to a video.

One of his "Ask Adam" videos, I believe the same one he discussed Pica pens.

> I really like this quote, but I can't find any reference to Adam Savage saying it.

Maybe, instead of attributing the quote to someone who said it, they attributed the quote to someone who they'd think would've said it.

No, Adam Savage has said something to this effect every time he talks about how his shop is organized and why it shifts around over time. The gist of it is that while most of his tools and common materials are first order retrievable, but theres a whole world of stuff in the shop that can't, so he thinks about where it should be stored and puts it there or there are times when a particular tool or set of tools is always used with some other thing in the shop, so it lives next to that other thing rather than on some rack of the same tools. What is most likely happening is that its all been in videos of which no readily searchable transcript exists, and he is not always very concise about explaining his core practices, so finding the exact quote is non-trivial.

Here's a Q&A where he says something like this: https://youtu.be/og0yYQAN1JE?t=233

I'd be better off putting them where I wouldn't look, that's probably where I'd look.

I've been following this since I heard him say it a few years ago, and I try to impress this upon my family as well

Periodically I buy things like Post-its because I can't find any--and then the next rare time when I really deep clean my office or attic, I find enough office supplies to open a stationary store.

A4 is an antimemetic paper size

Just buy a printer with two paper trays and reserve one for A4 paper. Problem solved!

Seems pretty heavy handed for something that happens at the cadence of Australian passport renewal (10 years in most cases). I believe I replace my printer at least that often.

The trick is, next time you need it, make note of where you first look for it, and when your acquire more, put the newly acquired paper on the first spot you looked for the old stuff.

Ah, but now I need to figure out where to put the "remember to leave a note" note so I find it in 2026.

Leave it as a reply to this comment.

Wherever you store your passport of course.

Why doesn't renewing it online work? is there still a paper based component to it? I don't think I had that problem last time I renewed mine online.

Sounds like a PC LOAD LETTER issue.

PC LOAD A4, you mean.

I went the other way with it. Bought a ream of A4 and I use it for everything. I hope it causes chaos.

Does it really matter? Letter size is close enough to A4 that I doubt anyone but paper nerds would notice

Filing systems, automatic paper handling systems built for A4 won't process US legal. Passport forms include machine read sections such as signature, as do tax returns.

It won't fit in binders, envelope, storage boxes or tab folders.

It's asking for trouble, rejection is likely.

For sending official paperwork to a judge or a visa or something like that, there are a lot of rules. Sending A4 instead of Letter will make them reject your paperwork on the spot.

Someone told me a horror story about a PhD thesis rejected because it has wrong margins (probably something about the margins of the document and additional margins added by the driver). He has to reprint all the copies. Most universities are not so stupid, but if your university is stupid enough, remember to triple check the margins.

> Sending A4 instead of Letter will make them reject your paperwork on the spot.

This generally happens not because anyone actually cares about the paper size, but because some employee has a target to 'process 5 applications per day, and then you can go home.' If an application is made on the wrong size paper, thats an insta-deny, and the employee just saved themselves an hour!

It's more about making nice folders where all the sheets hace the same size, and be able to make holes in the same spot in all of them. The employee has to be there 8 hours per day, even if there in no application to process.

In the 80s at UIC, there was famously a woman in the graduate school who checked measurements of all margins and other spacing with a ruler and rejected dissertations which didn’t meet the strict requirements.

In the early 2000s there was a person at Indiana U who also did this. You had to get any dissertation approved by her before printing. And there was a ruler. Are PDFs accepted for dissertations yet?

Dissertations go through the library's Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) service these days. Margins still matter, as do tons and tons of fiddly bullshit.

My personal ETD "hilarity": there is/was a bug in Adobe Acrobat that caused the font I set my dissertation in to glitch/look jagged at exactly 100% zoom. If you shifted to 99.7% or 100.1%? It re-rendered and looked perfect. Only on Acrobat. Not in Chrome or Firefox or Preview or Foxit or anything else. I had to change the font for ETD to accept my document.

Changing the font doesn't sound like a big deal, and in principle it's easy to do, but it means none of the figures match the main text. The line breaks are now totally different, so those typeset line-endings and paragraphs that were rephrased to avoid awkward hyphenations? All gone.

For that and a few other more important reasons, I have two versions of my dissertation. There's the one hosted by ETD, and the one that I actually share and use professionally.

For my MFA, my cohort was the first (and, it turned out last) to submit electronic copies of their theses. I doubt anyone was checking margins on that, although I made a point of making sure I hit all the formatting requirements. Of course, because I (and I think everyone from my cohort) requested an embargo of our theses expecting that someday we’d get NY publishing deals for our work. it effectively means that nobody will ever read them, unlike the cohorts who submitted printed theses which are shelved in the library so someone could go to the library and read them (at least in theory). Our program director mentioned something about some significant writer’s thesis in the University of Iowa library which has a note written inside the printed copy saying, “if you’re reading this, I guess I’m famous now.”

Why would anyone care if they received the other paper size? The differences are tiny.

Never underestimate the pettiness of a bureaucracy

Asetter us a bit wider it might not fit in a folder properly and when stacked with other A4 forms it won't match, which can be a flying also it probably is processed by a machine where it might not fit. (Say a scan er which extracts the signature to print onto the passport)

In the Philippines, it is even worse. At least four standards (A4, Letter, Legal, and Long Bond), and all of them are necessary for communication with various government agencies such as BIR.

I did not even know anything else than A4 existed, I just learned that now

Oh, come on. Everyone knows about A3 and A5.

For Americans et al. who don't know:

- A3 is (within physical tolerances, anyway) twice the size of A4

- A5 is half the size of A4

- A0 is the biggest size and and has an area of 1 square meter, although it is not a square but instead it has an aspect ratio of 1:sqrt(2) (technically all A-series papers have this aspect ratio because math says it is the aspect ratio that retains itself when halved)

- In practical sense, A5 is the smallest pre-packaged A-series paper that I have personally encountered, although I guess someone would chime that they handled A6 (half of A5) or smaller.

Never saw A6 printer paper, but it’s quite common for note cards / index cards.

> technically all A-series papers have this aspect ratio because math says it is the aspect ratio that retains itself when halved

I never knew this, but that's awesome. Thanks for the info!

Sure, I meant the imperial sizes in inches, never heard about that before. I assumed A4 was the global standard.

Powell began his term in January of 2001. It isn't clear how "early" in 2001 this change was made, but it seems to have been in process well before the Powell term as SoS and only completed shortly after he took office.

And still not even A4

A/B/C paper series formats are based on metrics system and therefore, morally evil and unfit for the US consumption.

In case anyone is unaware, A0 is 1m^2 in size, and each adjacent number is half the size (i.e. A1 = 500 000 mm^2, A2 = 250 000 mm^2, A3 = 125 000 mm^2, A4 = 62 500 mm^2).

This has the great advantage of allowing documents to be easily up and down-scaled on a photocopier - i.e. an A3 document can be printed at 50% scale on an A4 sheet.

I wonder if anyone ever tried to do something similar with imperial units (AKA English units to the US Americans) - i.e. create sheets of papers with side-length of sqrt(2) : 1, and the largest being 1 square yard or similar.

You're correct, but also forgetting the best part. The ratio between width and length stays the same!!

This specifically is what allows easy up-/downscaling for an A* size.

I guess the key thing actually is that the width of A(n) is the same as the height of A(n+1).

How often do you need to scale up or down a printed document? I don't see how that is useful.

You may want to print multiple pages per sheet.

By hand? Surely it would be faster to click a button in your word processor, which supports letter paper.

Print shops nearly always print multiple copies/multiple pages of a job onto larger sheets and them cut and collate them afterwards, as the print step takes the longest time which includes moving sheets in and starting the print and then stopping the print and moving the result out.

An A1 sheet can fit 4x A3 posters, 8x A4 pages or 16x A5 flyer/booklet pages without any wastage, so all you need is a single A1 printer.

Just like the US paper sizes:

ANSI A == 8.5 x 11 inches (letter)

ANSI B == 11 x 17 inches

ANSI C == 17 x 22 inches

ANSI D == 22 x 34 inches, etc.

There are additional sizes frequently used in the US too: business card, legal, half letter, and specialized sizes for architecture.

11/8.5 = 22/17 = 44/34 = 1.29

17/11 = 34/22 = 1.55

These have the property that they alternate aspect ratios every size, so you have to go up two sizes (4x area) to get back to the original aspect ratio.

Who cares?

I’ve only ever seen letter size paper available in offices in the US whereas almost every office photocopier/printer in UK/EU is stocked with both both A4 and A3. The larger sheets are really nice for sketching diagrams.

11x17 printer trays were common for engineering use before we got decent high resolution monitors and most work process became paperless.

9 x 12 inches and 11 x 14 inches are standard in art paper in the US. As are 5 x 7 and 8 x 10.

The first one, 9 x 12, happens to also be “ARCH A” but I haven’t seen a fancy name for the others.

* Imperial units are defined in terms of metric units.

* The cost of changing over is astronomical

* Domains where the metric system is actually better use the metric system

* Domains where it does not don't need it.

* You have a supercomputer on your wrist. Dividing by a number other than 10 is not such a challenge anymore.

* A4 paper is in no way superior to letter. It's just a choice.

Replacing American exceptionalism with European exceptionalism (usually because of someone's trip when they were in college) is not necessarily always an improvement.

> Replacing American exceptionalism with European exceptionalism (usually because of someone's trip when they were in college) is not necessarily always an improvement.

ISO 216 isn't specifically European. It's used in most of the world. The same is true of the metric system.

The world will indeed be incrementally better when people don't have to waste time converting measurements when operating between the US and elsewhere.

You assert it will be incrementally better without offsetting for the externalities of the switch, which would take decades.

Also the metric system is European in origin. Despite what chapter 0 of every science book implies god did not invent it.

Here's the thing about the switching and the costs of it: every other country, much poorer than the modern US of A, went through it just fine. And in any case, this cost is not going to go down the longer you wait, on the contrary—unless, of course, the US industrial prowess utterly collapses so that there is not much left to upgrade.

You're trying to say that because they did it and they're poorer it should be easier for us because we're richer. First of all, the cost will be in proportion to the activity of the economy and the population. Second, the proportion of people who were educated to use units of any kind was a smaller proportion of that smaller population. And in many former-non-metric countries many quantities are still often quoted in the old units.

All of that and it is still the case that the primary system in the US is the metric system de jure if not de facto. De facto, the metric system is virtually universal in science domains in the US.

Whether the metric system is "better" or not is not the question. There are keyboard layouts not actually designed to slow down typing, but it's just one of those things that most people don't see worth changing. Are they wrong? In that case, it's an individual valuation. I'm sure "the US economy is losing $500b because of QWERTY" would make great copy on a slow news day on reddit. But unless it costs <$500n to make the change, we aren't actually losing anything.

Not everyone is a relentless optimizer. Even some of us who are also like to optimize for the entire system, including transaction costs/overhead/maintenance and not just some ab initio declaration of right like god in genesis.

The US has a great solution that everyone hates because it's the US: we use metric where it's necessary and leave it alone everywhere else. We could use a lot more European know how in numerous other sectors. I would even go so far as to say it's probably correct to presume that things where the US is the outlier is a case where we are the ones doing it wrong.

It's a presumption, meaning evidence can rebut it. In this case, here we can manage both. We can teach both in schools, we can use computers and calculators to divide by numbers other than 10 (which you have to do with mixed units and constants in metric calculations anyway). In fact, I wonder if there's proof that all of this extra teaching and double system overhead is worth what it costs! I bet the answer is that it is though and as long as you can experiment and find out in your domain, it sounds great to me. Different systems for the win!

> Also the metric system is European in origin.

As is quite a lot of American culture. Lots of good European ideas got improved on by America. Do one more ;-)

America would be better with just three little improvements:

- Celsius temperatures near any Fahrenheit article/post/news.

- The metric system. Just scale up and down by ten. You already do it with dollars. So consider it done.

- ISO 6801 dates. Year, month, day. Things scale down logically. Years are composed of months; and months, of days. Also, they would be no ambiguity issues.

For the amount of money you're proposing to spend to make America better we could fund universal health care and almost completely fund 2-year college for everyone. I think that would be money better spent. And despite what everyone thinks of our schools, we manage to learn both systems and divide by numbers other than 10.

The imperial system is also European. fwiw Canada did the changeover to metric in the 70 and took about a decade and I’m rather glad we did it.

It's like technical debt. The longer you wait to fix it, the more it will cost you.

You people can downvote me all you want and the fact remains that the costs to make the switch are too high to happen any time soon. The real world isn't your company where you can just mandate things. Stakeholders, such as voters, get a say. Voters probably wouldn't support this if there was a net benefit in cost, but there's not, not anymore.

Of all of the things that are broken about the US, everyone here wants to fix the one thing that's not: our ambidexterity with units. Every school child learns both. We're terrible at raising kids to be bilingual, but we manage to teach them both metric and imperial units.

Once you concede that the metric system is already in de jure use in the US and in de facto use in domains where it's best to use it, you lose all kinds of benefit from switches. The low hanging fruit has been picked. You're left with empty non-empirical arguments like ... ummm... it's better to use one system. It is! But we're not starting from scratch.

Seriously, of all of the things I have posted on HN none has gotten more downvotes than saying that we don't need to go 100% metric in the US, I could speculate as to why, but it sure seems like this is some kind of nerd anti-normie shibboleth. It shouldn't be.

Go ahead, look up the figures. Then decide if it's still worth it to you. If it is, then try and convince enough policymakers not to just support it as the US does but to change everything over. You won't win that war. There has to be some specific need for the change.

'It would be cool' or 'it soothes my OCD' or whatever aren't enough to change something this massive.

Most problems it's a dodge to say "the money is better spent on X" but when you're talking about significant fractions of GDP that's just not how it is. We could do so much to improve people's lives with these sums of money.

Reminder that this is all about the US government internally sticking with letter sized paper. A4 paper is still A4 when measured in inches (which can be done exactly since inches are defined in terms of meters).

> You assert it will be incrementally better without offsetting for the externalities of the switch, which would take decades

The use of SI units is likely measured in centuries. You'll be fine, and you might save a few rockets, rollercoasters and planes here and there:

https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/6Page53.pdf

That one incident is because they didn't use metric in a domain where it would benefit from it. You won't save that rocket by changing how my clothes are labelled.

Consistency across all domains is a benefit in itself.

Yes, but as with everyone else, you are not factoring in the empirical value of the costs and just asserting it would be better.

And as already noted, since the switch can happen over 1-2 decades but the permanence of units is measured, the benefits of clarity and consistency necessarily outweigh the downsides.

I am not an American, I was raised using the metric system for almost everything, but I hate using it for manual work like carpentry and plumbing. For a long time in my country, we used the imperial system for stuff like that, and the change to metric is incredibly annoying and non-intuitive in those domains.

It seems non-intuitive exactly because you are used to imperial: "For a long time in my country, we used the imperial system for stuff like that". If you really were raised using metric not for almost everything, but for everything, it would seem intuitive and you've found the other system strange. And vice versa. That's just, in immortal words of Bjork "human behaviour".

He just said he wasn't American so why would it be intuitive to him?

I am not an American, but until a few years ago there was not much of a push to move to metric on things like tools and plumbing. A lot of the world used imperial for such things even if they were not former british colonies.

I understood what you meant. I was just saying that your case is different since it wasn't necessarily that way for you the way it is for Americans.

There are many domains where imperial units have a nice human scale that makes sense, and then there are others where it is total trash and useless. I still fail to see what's so terrible about using both.

Why are you bringing up imperial units? The US doesn't use them. The US uses US customary units.

Because they are based on (sorta) imperial and nobody really knows the difference all that well. So people say imperial when referring to the non metric countries that happen to speak English.

At least insofar as being defined in terms of metric units, the statement you replied to was accurate for both imperial and customary.

Aside from being overly pedantic, which is the reason I used the term, the doubly overly pedantic reply is that we do have the Imperial system, just redefined to be different than the itself-later-redefined imperial system.

Furthermore, the names of the units are from the imperial system, even if the definitions themselves are not.

Try pouring an imperial gallon into a us gallon container and then tell me I'm being overly pedantic.

The names of the units are from the winchester system which is what predated both US customary units and Imperial units.

I didn't say "imperial gallon" I said "imperial system" which is both historically correct and what people colloquially call it. Yes, since we adopted those units the measures have changed repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. I get it.

The US customary units were 1st established prior to the imperial system existing so it is not historically correct to say they are based upon the imperial system.

> The cost of changing over is astronomical

as opposed to the cost of not changing over, which is much larger but paid in small increments over time so nobody is bothered enough to do anything about it

That's false. Most domains where it would benefit have already made the change.

> metric [...] morally evil

I've never heard an American complain that Coca Cola is sold by the liter. There's no moral component to Americans not wanting to switch to metric. It's simply a matter of the switch and retooling being more hassle than continuing to use American customary units. Frankly, the difference seems to bother Europeans a lot more than it bothers Americans.

> Frankly, the difference seems to bother Europeans a lot more than it bothers Americans.

Probably because European consume a lot of content from the US which makes little sense to them

Same observation here. We (Americans) just don’t care. Not like we’re sitting here huffing and puffing about metric.

Nobody. Cares.

At the end of the day, the one you’re used to is the one that makes more sense. There is no system that is objectively better “in all situations.”

Most people that strongly argue that one is better than the other are usually just saying “it’s better cuz I’m used to it”

One argument would be "the best system is the one that everyone agrees on" [1]. Lower risk for big mistakes.

[1] https://everydayastronaut.com/mars-climate-orbiter/

These always make for fun news articles but that's because these situations are rare.

Again, nobody, anywhere that I'm aware of, is sitting around insisting for imperial units as a matter of principle. We just don't care. We use and learn metric where we use it (all the sciences, chemistry, physics, etc in American schools are taught in metric). And we use imperial where we use it, mostly in daily life. And it's perfectly fine.

For example, I personally prefer grams (more because of weight, but still preferred to ounces) to cups (volume) in recipes because it removes density as a variable (a packed cup of flour vs a loose cup of flour)

> "everyone agrees on"

"Everyone" in what scope? For an international team of engineers and scientists, the answer is obviously metric. But if "everybody" in the relevant context is other tradesmen in America, then "everybody" agrees on the American customary units. It doesn't matter to the latter what the former pick.

Metric is easier. How does the humanity count? By using powers of 10. The usability it's right there. Just keep adding zeros.

But you've just stated that metric is easier mathematically. And I agree with you 100%, for that use case.

But C/F makes absolutely no difference in understanding the weather. Or cooking temperatures. Apart from measuring body temperature and possibly controlled lab environments, there is no situation in life where you need to break temperatures into 1/10 units or benchmark the weather on the boiling/freezing temperatures of water at sea level (I'm talking about the population at large, not meteorologists).

Miles/KM make absolutely no difference in understanding the distance you need to drive somewhere. The fact that a KM is 1000m does nothing to help you understand that the neighboring city is 40 miles (or 64km, or 64,000m) away.

Inches/MM make no difference when I'm doing woodworking. Although, again, no doubt doing the math is easier in mm than adding/removing fractions for inches.

My point is that, one can agree with the simplicity and standardization of the metric system (and I love its consistency) and also argue that it makes no difference in daily life.

The metric vs imperial discussion reminds me of Android vs iPhone discussions: Android users tend to care a lot more that their text message bubbles are green than the iPhone users do.

Ha! The rest of the world uses WhatsApp.

>I've never heard an American complain that Coca Cola is sold by the liter. There's no moral component to Americans not wanting to switch to metric.

There is, it's just that Americans are happy to overlook it here and there for completely arbitrary reasons.

> There is,

Show me the evidence. Where are these Americans sincerely claiming that metric is immoral?

The American military uses metric.

The reason why the rest of the world cares more is because US is literally the only country that hasn't switched that "matters" (for engineering and business purposes). Until y'all do that, everybody else has to contend with two systems at least occasionally because of commerce, tourism etc. Once you do, it's just metric going forward, which makes things so much easier for everyone. Standards produce the most benefit when they're truly universal.

The US military is no stranger to the metric system, it's the standard.

The metric standard was defined by law as the official measurement system of the us in the nineteenth century. But Americans are stubborn.

No wonder State Department is called Foggy Bottom (I know the real reason) but it lives up to its name.

US Government Letter Paper is 8x10.5 inches, though I think it's used only for internal documents. Probably too much inertia to try to change it to 8.5x11.

> "If anything so innocuous as changing the size of the paper for Diplomatic Notes was so exceedingly difficult, how difficult would it be to make more important changes?" Strickler says.

How difficult was it to change the size? Getting the official requirement changed was difficult; what would have happened if he hadn't bothered and had just started sending everything on normal paper?