Categories: uncategorized
Date: 01 July 2005 03:00:00
At work morning I had a conversation with a colleague about paper sizes.
We were talking about whether to print out a drawing on A1 or A0 paper, and it led on to him querying whether there was a standard size that was twice as large as A0. The most worrying thing was that I could give him the answer: yes, it's called 2A0, and twice that is 4A0!
Why do I know this? Well, for a short time I laboured under the idea that someone (anyone would do) would be interested in absorbing a pointless fact each day. So for a number of weeks I reported on a pointless fact, and international paper sizes was one such fact.
Only now I've made use of my research (or rather Markus Kuhn's: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html ), by using it to answer someone's question, I feel that I can no longer class it as 'useless'.
Perhaps I ought to stick to more obviously useless statements, such as the quote that hangs on the wall of another colleague's office;
"The world's greatest fool may say the sun is shining, but that doesn't make it dark outside"