Void Ratio for Dummies

Void (blue); not void (black)

It's irritating as hell to be doing online research and accidentally click on a link to some of the twaddle put forth by mommybloggers and the other yutzes who've churned out crap content in a never-ending search for residual income. If you recognize it as rubbish, you waste your time, but if you fall for the fake the results can be far worse. We thank heaven every day that we're not trying to do school homework, because if we were we'd be in grave danger of taking the "knowledge" of these people at face value. Want an example? Sure: our guest bullshit artist today is a repeater, Jennifer Fleming of eHow (see her first visit). Today, Jennifer's sharing her erudition on the subject of "How to Calculate Void Ratio"¹:

Fleming introduced the topic with some bull about "Oceanic production sites that extract and distribute oil-based products," which appears to be a spun version of "offshore oil production platforms." After citing some "expert" or other, she went on to explain the process of calculating the void ratio:

"Identify the formula. Void is determined by dividing the void's [sic] volume by the voids solid. Void's [sic] volume is calculated by adding volume of air to volume of water. Volume of solid is determined by summarizing [sic] volume of air, volume of solid and volume of water."

eHow demands that every step in a process begin with an "action verb," which is why Fleming opened with the inane "Identify the formula"' but sadly, that's the most useful piece of information she provided. 

Here's the formula you're supposed to "identify": void ratio equals the volume of void space divided by the volume that isn't void space.  It really is just that simple! Yet this dumbass felt she had to stretch her "daffynition" into three sentences, the third of which turns out to be completely wrong! If you were to strip out the crapola and the bad grammar in that example, you would find that Fleming has, in fact, restated the formula for calculating porosity instead of void ratio. Porosity = the volume that's void space divided by the total volume (we have to assume that by "summarizing" she really meant "summing").

We're not sure what's sadder here; that this charlatan was paid fifteen dollars for writing her peculiar brand of bull or that some "content editor" at eHow allowed such unmitigated crap to be published. Our knowledge of Demand Studio's process makes us really wish we could identify the other Dumbass of the Day here.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_8741242_calculate-void-ratio.html

copyright © 2015-2022 scmrak

DD - PHYSICS