I'm glenn fleishman in for jackson bird. Who is on vacation. How did paper sizes fall into their century. Long groove. how low wage workers seem to have the upper hand the job market despite pandemic job losses. And the very newest freshest words are in here are some of the cool things from the news today. Why is letter sized paper eight and a half by eleven inches. It's a great question asked and answered by mental floss in a recent article leaning on a variety of existing research. The answer they say. Is that the molds used by the dutch to make paper centuries ago were settled on around forty four inches. Because that's the whitest that papermaker vat man could hold while dipping into the liquid slurry of pulp and lift back up to drain the water. A seventeen inch depth is more obscure but may again be related merely physical capabilities. Divide seventeen by two and forty four by four and you get eight sheets of eight and a half by eleven paper boom there you go but do you know the story about the ham cooking ham for his partner. who asks. why do you cut the ends off. i don't know my mother always did that. They visit the mother and she says oh. I don't know it makes it more juicy. My mother always kept the ends off. Finally they visit grandma and her retirement. Home she holds up her hands a short distance apart and says we had a pan this wide. So i cut the ends off. That's how most mechanical traditions work inertia shah and history as a historian of printing and type. I'll tell you that. When gutenberg printed his bible there were also standard paper sizes but not many because paper was used for very particular purposes mostly for writing by hand because printing mostly didn't exist yet. The good and bible is put it on the size of paper known as royal two pages on each side folded down to about twelve by seventeen inches or thirty by forty two centimeters..