Pine Trees for Dummies

The saying "he can't see the forest for the trees" might well be the motto of eHow's stable of freelance writers. The worst of them, forced to fit their misinformation into a restrictive format and hardwired word-count range, often do little more than spout disconnected facts more or less at random. In doing so, it's not uncommon for the dumbasses among them to omit basic facts while going into great detail about trivia. For an example, let's look at Nicole Papagiorgio, writing (quite appropriately) on "How to Identify Types of Pine Trees,"¹ which Leaf Group has, for unknown reasons, niched over at Hunker.com

We here at the Antisocial Network just happen to have a degreed forester (B. S., University of Arizona) on staff (Nicole has, as do so many Demand Media drones, an Associates Degree in.... ta-da! Journalism), who directed us to a number of dichotomous keys for identification of different species of pines. Here's a key that's fairly general as opposed to the very specific one Nicole found for a biology lab at "University of Berkeley" (we think she meant University of California at Berkeley). In any case, Nicole's version of a dichotomous key (such as it is) is replete with problems. She starts out with

"Measure the length of the needles of the pine tree." Well, no, dichotomous keys for the identification of pines generally begin with, "Count the number of needles in the bundle." Her second step is "Smell the tree." Again, no: a general key (instead of one written for a Botany 101 class at one specific west-coast university) next asks about needle length or instructs you to inspect the cones. And then Nicole starts getting into specific trees. If you use Nicole's key, you'll learn that your tree "could be" any of several species, though she never actually says it is a named species; except for telling you it's one of some rather unusual pines like Hartweg's pine (native to Central America), the bishop pine (almost extinct, restricted to California's Channel Islands), or the knobcone pine (only known from the Pacific coast). Nothing about lodgepole, sugar, or loblolly pines, for instance; and nothing about the vanilla-scented bark of the ponderosa.

That's the problem with getting ignorant freelancers to do eHow's research: they spray disconnected factoids all over the page, any one of which might be correct but which in total are far too often useless. And that's why Nicole Papagiorgio and her content editor (all of eHow, come to think of it) are entirely deserving to be today's Dumbass of the Day.

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_7500558_identify-types-pine-trees.html

copyright © 2015-2021 scmrak

SI - BIOLOGY