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| Earth's layers |
Well, eHow week is over, which is a shame: the site has always been far better at organizing its content than at hiring competent writers, so examples of dumbassery are easy to find. They're just as common at other sites, but harder to find because of the crappy organization (or because they're hidden, as they are at HubPages.com). Such is life, we suppose...
Back to dumbasses, though: today's featured freelancer is Dee Dee Thompson of DemandMedia, writing for Synonym Science on the topic of "What Evidence Suggests That the Earth's Outer Core Is Liquid?" (now moved to Sciencing.com by Leaf Group, still as stupid). Now Dee Dee more or less answered the question, but she had a problem: the real answer would only take up a short paragraph, so she had to pad it out to meet Demand Media's minimum word requirement of 300-500 words. Here's where she went wonky:
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"...the core as a whole is Earth’s deepest and hottest layer... The outer core is approximately 2,300 kilometers (1,430 miles) in depth [emphasis ours]...The inner core, by contrast, is made almost entirely of iron and is only 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) thick..."
In (only barely) rewording her padding from National Geographic's website on the structure of the earth, Dee Dee got confused – or more likely changed an "insignificant" word or two to reduce the possibility of running afoul of DMS's plagiarism police. She screwed up, though: you see, what NatGeo actually says:
"The outer core is approximately 2,300 kilometers (1,430 miles) thick...The inner core...is approximately 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) thick."
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| In reality, the boundary between the Earth's core and mantle lies at about 2,800 kilometers (1800 miles or so) depth – not thickness. You'd think that a "a full-time science and mathematics educator," as Thompson styled herself, would know the difference between thickness and depth, but apparently she didn't. In our book, that sure makes her a dumbass – a Dumbass of the Day! |
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SI - GEOLOGY
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