A4 Paper Stories
92 points by susam
92 points by susam
We drink our tea from doughnuts.
I about stood up and cheered reading this line.
it's silly, you can't drink tea from doughnuts. You need at least one surface minimum along at least one axis. If there's no interior space, there's no "from"!
An intact teacup has one hole, just like a doughnut.
Yes. However, you cannot put tea in a doughnut. It will leak out.
You need a surface minimum to have an indentation that you can pour tea into.
I once had an idea of getting a ruler tattoo on my index finger! :`D
Adam Savage (MythBusters, Tested) has one on his forearm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GCy0oOSPYo
Friend of mine got himself the ruler tattoo as well, and now he's constantly using it.
It's such a stupid meme, but i can't deny it's practical to not need a ruler to have something better thsn eyeballing
I did chuckle at the part where someone had asked Savage if he'd had the tattoo offset a known amount from his fingertip, to measure things longer than the ruler. He had not, but it seems like an obvious addition now that it has been suggested.
Now I'm looking at my existing tattoo sleeve, wondering if there are distinct, non-ruler landmarks I could measure in advance.
Even more frequently than A4 paper, I have my arms with me. My cubit is 49cm, hand span 22cm, and hand breadth 10.5cm. I measure things using my cubit and span frequently, and breadth occasionally. Most of the time I round the cubit to 50cm.
That's why I'm so happy my palm is almost exactly A5 - I might not have A5 paper with me, but I know its size, so it's quite handy (pun intended)
Of course, here in Eagleland we don't normally use An paper sizes, instead having things like letter, ledger, legal, executive, and so on. I think most people might know the dimensions of letter paper, (25.34 x 33 barleycorn), but not the others.
Living in Eagleland I still have a ream of A4 loaded in one of my printer's feeders, because I've encountered more than one occasion where I wanted to print an A4 PDF in the correct scale
Living in mooseland I was shocked that Staples here didn't carry any A4 paper. We needed to print out a document to get a visa and of course it needed to be A4. They must have had 100 different types of paper in that shop. Thought there would have been one packet of A4 in the corner.
I did a PhD in math in my youth and, despite growing up with A4, came to love the letter size for doing calculations on. I would buy a couple of packs of letter size whenever I was in the colonies and bring back to my office.
We know it only as "irritatingly not quite A4 and randomly appears as the default page size even when you've set your locale properly".
I often use The ape index to check if something is roughly a meter's length.
How? Are you 1m/2m tall?
I'm 188cm, so if my arm span is equal to my height then half my arm span will be approximately 1m. I usually do that by holding something from the middle of my chest with one arm, with the other arm fully extended. It's not exactly a meter, but close enough for my needs.
If you mark the edge of the paper where the thing you want to measure is, you can then use folding to bisect the line as many times as you need to get the accuracy you desire!
Ah yes. A4 paper. Exactly 30x20 centimeters, ± rounding errors. Actually, that's a pretty good method for advanced guesstimation
CD cases are 12.5 cm x 14 cm. And yes, that was useful for a surprisingly long time. Also IIRC EU cigarette packs were exactly 5.5cm wide (before they changed the prices and introduced different sizes, so I'm more talking 90s and early 00s here)
I suppose my knowledge of measurement helpers vaned some time ago, but I'm also using A4 pages in a pinch.
