| As Dire Straits once said, "sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug." Around the Antisocial Network, we have a corollary: sometimes the dumbass is the freelancer and sometimes the dumbass asked the question. If you're greedy enough, though, you could always pick up fifteen bucks or so from Demand Media Studios for writing stupid answers to stupid questions. That's what J. T. Barett did for the Seattle PI "education" section by informing us "What Do Fossil Fuels Look Like?"¹ Yeah, a truly stupid question, but hey: for a few dollars, some people will "answer" anything. You'd hope that the answer would be accurate, but Barrett's answer is... well, it's half-assed (the question probably deserved a half-assed answer, though). Here's why we think so: |
- "Gasoline, a fossil fuel, is a component of petroleum oil." Well, no: first, "petroleum oil" is redundant and second, gasoline isn't a component of crude oil; it's a refined product made by extracting several components of crude oil. Last, gasoline isn't technically a fossil fuel; petroleum is the fossil fuel. He even said that in the introduction!
- "Anthracite... represents a more final stage in the underground formation of coal..." The suspect grammar of "more final stage" notwithstanding, anthracite isn't a stage in the formation of coal. It's metamorphosed bituminous coal.
- Barrett doesn't even bother to mention lignite, which accounts for about 40% of all coal mined in the USA. Dummy.
- "Natural gas, or methane, forms a part of underground petroleum deposits; living organisms also produce it in significant quantities." Methane is a component of natural gas, but it's not the same thing. The higher the methane content of natural gas, the poorer the quality (lower heat generation). By the by: if living organisms are creating the methane, it isn't a fossil fuel, is it... dumbass.
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| A truckload of Wyoming lignite coal |
For his sins of factual commission and his sins of factual omission, the Antisocial Network hereby awards J. T. Barrett the Dumbass of the Day for 16 June, 2015. Enjoy...
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¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was education.seattlepi.com/fossil-fuels-look-like-3617.html
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