Acronyms for Dummies

Radar gun

An interesting factoid, for those of you who weren't already aware, is that the "experts" at Demand Media (now known as Leaf Group, parent company of a bunch of niches filled with eHow content) aren't allowed to cite wikipedia.com, the web encyclopedia, as an reference. That's because the website isn't "an authority," the same reason lots of high school teachers don't allow its use for students writing term papers.

In reality, Wikipedia is usually right, especially about matters of fact, as compared to matters of opinion. When it comes to being wrong about matters of fact, you need a greedy freelancer; someone like Joan Whetzel of HubPages.com (and Leaf Group, for that matter). Joan's the one who penned the Owlcation.com article she calls "Speed Measuring Instruments" that contains this juicy bit of misinformation: 

"Police use radar to check for speeders. Radar uses the Doppler effect, which bounces sound waves [sic] off moving vehicles, then calculates the sound wave frequency as the return to the instrument."

Huh? Radar uses sound waves? Here's how wikipedia defines radar: "Radar is an object-detection system that uses radio waves [emphasis ours] to determine the range, altitude, direction, or speed of objects." Joan you're a dumbass: the word "radar" is an acronym for Radio detection and ranging: of course it doesn't use sound! A police radar gun does calculate an object's velocity using the Doppler effect, but not by bouncing sound waves off of it. Maybe if you'd read the entire wikipedia entry on radar guns instead of finding yourself an elementary-level discussion to understand the Doppler effect, you wouldn't have fixated on sound. But you didn't, and that makes you the Dumbass of the Day.

This article reminds us a phenomenon sometimes known as "the dopeler effect": the closer our Dumbass of the Day gets, the dumber she appears.

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